I had so much fun coding Silverlight Rocks! I thought I would try one more game in Silverlight before moving on to some data type stuff.

This prototype is called Destroy All Invaders and is inspired by Mark Fennell's Wings Flash game. But instead of using Google Maps, I am using Microsoft Virtual Earth Oblique (Birds-eye) imagery. The goal is simple: use the mouse to steer your chopper around and destroy the invading UFO's before they destroy you. You can use the Ctrl key to accelerate and the left mouse button to fire.

I am able to get about 30 fps consistently with the scroll, not as good as the 60 fps with stationary backgrounds, but still better than a sharp stick in the eye.

I may be able to do some tweaks to get more speed, and I'm guessing the final release of Silverlight 1.1 will be faster as well. Currently, the background is a canvas that I plug Image elements into with map tiles. Virtual Earth uses 256x256 tiles for its oblique view. These images are snapped by low flying aircraft and the quality is so good it's a bit spooky and big-brother-ish.

The ufo's and chopper are vector-based Path elements but the cool shadow effects were accomplished by using PNG images (so that the alpha blending comes through as a shadow).

I will be posting some more info on this game later and source code examples...