Monday, December 22, 2008

Word War 2 : Updated to version 1.1

I've made several changes to the game over the last several days.

  • added 8 letter words to the dictionary
  • in solo player mode, the review screen now shows all possible words
  • better sorting the award list in the review screen
  • many new awards
  • Thursday, December 18, 2008

    Word Wars II : No Mercy

    Its here! Finally...



    Word Wars II is a small word game you can play by yourself or with friends. I built this to learn Windows Presentation Foundation (the look and feel parts of the game) and to refresh myself Windows Communication Foundation (the network part of the game).

    You can get the game from this link.

    WARNING: If you don't already have .NET 3.5 installed, the first time downloading will take a really long time!

    Its a ClickOnce application which means that it will install the game and any required things from Microsoft (.NET 3.5 service pack 1). Any updates I make to the game in the future will automatically update you whenever you launch the game.

    The game puts the icon in the Magrathea Labs folder in the Start Menu.

    Some things you should know (since I don't adequately explain them in the game):

    1) When you start the game, go to Options.
    2) Select the Default user from the list.
    3) Click the Rename button.
    4) Type in a new name and press Enter
    5) Hit the ESC key.

    Also, in the chat window you can type /help and hit Enter. A couple of commands are there.

    Other items of note:

    1) The dictionary has vulgar words in it. Use caution in what words you make when playing with children.

    2) The dictionary is currently lacking 8 letter words. It won't know what you mean if you correctly enter one. Sorry, but the dictionary is a huge project. If anyone want to help me improve it let me know via a comment here.

    3) There are occasionally bugs that crash the game... usually while trying to connect to another game. This is usually caused by the host, not the client. The host will likely need to restart the game to fix this. I'm still trying to find a way to fix this.

    4) Technical note: the games defaults to port 9002. Also, when hosting a game on a LAN, the host broadcasts to all machines on the LAN using port 5050.

    Have fun!

    Wednesday, December 10, 2008

    Beware the Constructor!

    If you find yourself getting the dreaded Loading Error on a WPF page the first place you should look is the constructor of the control is trying to load.

    I had a problem for two day which was finally resolved by moving this line:

    ListBoxMessages.ItemsSource = Helper.Messages;

    From the UserControl constructor to the Loaded event handler.