Yesterday my game “No Cue Pool” got verified and published on the Microsoft marketplace. It is a pool game where the player control the white ball using the accelerometer. There are online highscore lists and 3 types of game play.

This is the free version of the game, and I’m following the download rates closely, because if they are good then I’ll make an extended paid-for version with more game types and functionality to play against other online players. Click the image to go to the game in the marketplace.

I’m working on a game project for the Microsoft Phone / xbox. I decided to try out the box2d library for this one, and found the Farseer engine, which is a well supported library with many developers using it.

Things have been working well, but over the week-end I ran into a strange behaviour. Shapes (called body(ies) in the box2d world) got stuck to static shapes. So if a ball slowly approach a static wall it would be stuck to the wall, and it wouldn’t get away again (at least not by bouncing other balls into it). The ball would only move along the static wall.

Now this isn’t really expected behaviour in an environment simulating physics in the normal world! I have searched high and low to find a solution to this, and in the end my curious mind got into the Settings class, and I found the VelocityThreshold, which was set to 0.3f. This is indeed the culprit, as it treat any velocity below this threshold as inelastic. When set to 0.0f (zero point zero) the world starts to behave normally. This might be ok in a senario with non-static bodies, but in an world with static walls, not so great…

That was then that Sunday afternoon… 😉

I’ve had an interesting start to my Windows Phone explorations. Rune Escape is currently #15 for “paid apps” in the card/board games category, unfortunately not as lucrative as being #15 on the Android or iPhone markets. hi ho!

So I thought it was time to see how a free (add sponsored – with less functionalities) version would do…

Today it got published and can it be found here.