Cutting Your Teeth on FMOD Part 6: Recording and visualizing sound card output

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to intercept and record the output from a sound card. Our primary focus here will be to create a visualizer that reflects the output sound using the frequency analysis technique discussed in part 4, however you can of course use the recording code for any purpose you wish.

I won’t go into the details of FFT frequency analysis here (see part 4 for that); we’ll just look at how to capture the real-time sound output then provide the visualizer as a usage example.

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LightSwitch for Games Part 3: Creating a Web Interface for your Users

NOTE: Although this series is aimed at small game developers, it is equally applicable to anyone wishing to learn how to use LightSwitch.

In this article, I present a fast crash course in a raft of commonly used LightSwitch techniques. You will learn:

• how to make your web site base URL re-direct to your LightSwitch application
• how to enable remote error viewing in a LightSwitch HTML client application
• how to create new LightSwitch screens (web pages and dialog boxes)
• the difference between Browse, View Detail and Add/Edit Detail screens
• how to add buttons that allow the user to navigate between screens
• how to associate queries to LightSwitch tables and use them as the basis for new screens
• how LightSwitch categorizes data sets into All, Set and Single types, and how each data set type can be used
• how to create local properties (client-side variables that are associated with a single screen)
• how to make table rows and local properties on one screen input parameters to another screen
• how to create a button which executes custom code when clicked
• how to access table rows and local properties from client-side JavaScript
• how to perform custom client-side validation in JavaScript
• what the new LightSwitch ServerApplicationContext API is and how to use it
• how to make generic handlers (.ashx scripts) which can be used from client-side JavaScript to query and change data on the server from a LightSwitch HTML screen
• how to use jQuery to send data (with HTTP POST) and retrieve the response from a web page (in this case, .ashx scripts)
• how to use promises in LightSwitch to store a future result that is currently unknown (generally, the result of a request to the server) and make asynchronous (non-blocking) requests to the server
• how to create a custom control in JavaScript to represent a masked text box (a text box where the contents are replaced with asterisks or dots, like a password entry box)
• how to access the name of the currently logged in user with client-side JavaScript (for rendering purposes)
• how to change the default theme of a LightSwitch HTML application
• how to customize the default images in your LightSwitch HTML client application
• how to customize the LightSwitch HTML client login screen to match the rest of your web site

This article assumes some familiarity with:

• HTTP GET and POST methods
• HTML and CSS
• JSON
• a basic understanding of JavaScript (no jQuery knowledge is needed)
• a basic understanding of C#

Project Goals

In part 2 of this series we looked at how to securely allow anonymous users to create full user accounts for themselves, and how to expose this as a service via OData over HTTP to our future game clients. We looked at the basics of OData, WCF RIA Services, how to assign permissions and roles and how to limit a user to only accessing their own data. In this part, we’ll look at how to create a web-based user interface to allow gamers to edit/update their accounts. Our goals:

• allow the user to log in to a web site using their LightSwitch account
• allow the user to view and edit their profile (except their username)
• provide a change password dialog which requires the old and new passwords, and the new password to be typed twice
• customize the appearance of the site to your own company style

NOTE: You need Visual Studio Professional 2012 Update 2 or Update 3, or Visual Studio 2013 (Preview) to complete the tutorials in this article. Note that in Visual Studio 2013 (Preview), the organization of items in Solution Explorer has changed so some items may be in different places to those indicated below.

Simple2D 1.12 now available

A new major release of Simple2D is now available (the download link can be found at the bottom of the page).

Version 1.12 has a key focus on:

• An improved, cleaner initialization interface
• Basic Direct3D support including the ability to draw with both Direct2D and Direct3D onto the same render target
• Full editing support for text boxes (navigation, editing, selection, Windows clipboard and infinite undo)
• Some improvements to XInput gamepad support
• Numerous bug fixes