best practice for displaying complex video content or complex animated content

Question

Hi All

I've got a project I need to start on soon and I'd like some advice on how best to approach it. So basically what I'd like is to create an application which has some interactive content on it that you can invoke by touch. However the content isn't interface elements like dropdowns and other UI elements. The content is more like an interactive animation aimed at kids, so for instance you have a scene which has a house, if you tap the door of the house the door swings open, a sound is played and maybe something behind the door animates (like someone standing behind the door)

So if I was doing this project I'd make these kind of animations in the timeline and then jump to those parts of the animation triggered by the tap events. So how to approach this in the windows store environment?  I'm thinking I could maybe make a video of the content and then jump to that time in the video where a certain video appears? 

Otherwise I could make all my elements as pngs and absolutely position them but I don't know how I could then animate those PNGs, I could replace them with video's that have alpha channels but I'm not sure that windows 8 store supports this?

Anyone have and tips and tricks they'd care to share?

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Syllogism,

From your description, it seems the app you want to create has lots of UI animation feature and requirements. Then, I think you might need to consider if you'd like to develop this application as a standard application which is driven by data/services but have many UI animation features or if you want to develop it as a game application which does not quite care about data access and business operations. For standard windows store application (with javascript), you can leverage the HTML/CSS3 based anitmation support to enhance your app's UI:

#Animating your UI (Windows Store apps using JavaScript and HTML)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465165.aspx

#Animating (Windows Store apps using JavaScript and HTML)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh849087.aspx

And if you want to create it as a game, here are some references about developing windows store game applications:

#Technologies for developing Windows Store games for Windows (Windows Store apps)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh452780.aspx

#Creating a Windows Store game using JavaScript
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465158.aspx

#Tools for creating a Windows Store Game using HTML and JavaScript
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Devs4Devs/Tools-for-creating-a-Windows-Store-Game-using-HTML-and-JavaScript

 

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Answer 2

Thanks for a great response! really helpful