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[Eeriepanda]

I am posting here to gauge interest in a Silverlight game engine or even Silverlight game development in general.

Over the past few days I have been working on a data driven silverlight 2 (beta2) game engine. I have made great progress with it and I am nearing a milestone for it this weekend that would allow for development of a single player game.

If I post up the DLL this weekend with a decent tutorial, would anyone want to take a shot at trying it out or even trying out Silverlight?

(Brief overview of the game engine)

• Includes XML Parser for data driven games
• Collision Detection
• Support for animations
• Physics
• Event Tracking

Side note: These may seem like minor things but Silverlight natively either supports these features poorly or not at all. Without these features Silverlight has a staggering amount of initial footwork that I'm afraid would turn away many people.

[Melly]

Isn't Silverlight Microsoft trying to make Flash stuff?

[Al King]

Pretty much. There's at least one person interested, anyway

[Eeriepanda]

Pretty much. There's at least one person interested, anyway

well I would stalk him with promise of silverlight candy but he has a huge 2x4.

[ravuya]

I'd like to try it out but I'd rather convert my existing C# OpenGL API over. That means I need a lot more free time.

[raigan]

my existing C# OpenGL API

Are you using home-made or Tao?

[ravuya]

I'm wrapping Tao. I'd be using it for games but I can't reliably get it to work on the Mac. I will once I get the time.

[raigan]

Damn it, we were going to use Tao on Mac too.. what's the problem?

Also, to further hijack: how the hell do you get a proper main loop happening?! Everyone seems to suggest hacky unmanaged win32 dll workarounds that totally defeat the cross-platformness..

[ravuya]

I'll post about it more when i'm back at a computer, but my issue was packaging and distribution. The app would run fine on both platforms but packaging Mono took a few days of research I didn't have time for. Some people pulled it off and I have their notes... Unity does it. I'll post again about this later.

[Eeriepanda]

Alas thread hijacked 


This pretty much determines that there is very little interest in silverlight game development. :D but I'll show you all with my Subspace Client xD

[team_q]

I was interested but I was underwhelmed with Microsoft's web content regarding it.

[Jrsquee]

I don't get it.  What are the advantages of Silverlight over Flash?

…I like the logo though.

[Eeriepanda]

www.bubblemark.com

(though their silverlight 2 demo is broken)

Anyhow Silverlight 2 has access to hardware so in the case of that demo was getting 500 fps while everything else was around 60 fps. Same as Flash 10 stuff. Also, I enjoy the feeling of breaking newish ground instead of treading in the footsteps of others. (there are some game apis for silverlight out there but they are mostly shite)

[GlingGling]

www.bubblemark.com

(though their silverlight 2 demo is broken)

Anyhow Silverlight 2 has access to hardware so in the case of that demo was getting 500 fps while everything else was around 60 fps. Same as Flash 10 stuff. Also, I enjoy the feeling of breaking newish ground instead of treading in the footsteps of others. (there are some game apis for silverlight out there but they are mostly shite)

If Silverlight has the raw power you say it does then it will only be a matter of time before people begin supporting it. I've personally already seen a lot of interest in Silverlight I think it's going to take off. You see Moonlight being developed by Novell which is a good sign of its future. This guy has written a really nice physics library that works for Silverlight ( http://www.codeplex.com/FarseerPhysics ).

So I think that something that you are making to help game developers use Silverlight would be appreciated. Perhaps you should be a bit more formal and post it in a blog with updates and whatnot. You're probably not going to generate much interest in the deep bowels of forums.

If there are friendly APIs then people will use it.

[Eeriepanda]

yeah, I actually have a blog for it but I'm going through the steps of company approval (since they technically own it, since they own me haha). So I'm kinda in a limbo stage and jumped the gun a little bit.


Interesting note: I actually integrated the farseer physics into it and I'm thoroughly impressed with how flexible/easy to use Farseer Physics is. I have it to the point where you define game objects(whether monsters, players, or props) in XML including the physics data. By storing the data in XMLs you open up interesting possibilities... such as using a web CMS(like drupal) to manage your game.

[GlingGling]

^ Well make sure to keep us in the loop here. At the very least what you are doing sounds very interesting, that alone should generate interest.

[theparticleman]

Add another person to list of people interested in Silverlight game development.  (That other person is me, just it case you were in doubt.)

[Powergloved Andy]

I was looking into Silverlight there for awhile, but I put it on one of my "to-do" lists and who knows when I'll get around to looking into it further. But I'm not opposed to it.

[mildmojo]

No support for my platform, no interest even if there was. 

On that Bubblemark page, I was surprised to find the Java applet putting all the others to shame.  200fps in Java (Swing), 90fps in Flash (flex or flex/cachedbitmap), 90fps in DHTML (whoda thunk?), and 5fps in Silverlight Javascript using Novell's Moonlight plugin.  The Silverlight CLR tests locked my browser up for a minute or two.

The Java applet using the PulpCore framework actually ran at 350-400fps, which is damned impressive.  I come across very few fast Java applets or applications; I wonder how they pull that off.

[Zaknafein]

On WinXP, Silverlight 2.0 CLR is twice as fast as all the others... including PulpCore!
And it runs in the dev-branch version of Google Chrome, which is nice.