Silverlight

[SaphuA]

Not sure what I want to discuss here realy. Just anything concerning the topic will do. Some new secret information you know about, neat samples you came across or maybe a game made in silverlight?

I personaly think that Silverlight is going to be pretty big and I think I'll definatly have a hard time to choose between Flash or Silverlight. Being able to code C# in a great editor instead of AS3 in a crappy one is one of the reasons I'll choose Silverlight above Flash. I guess I'll have to wait for the final release and play with it a little bit to make a decission though.

Ps: Please think twice before you post. If this thread turns in a useless anti MS debate I'll ask a mod to close it.

Edit: Good source for information:
http://silverlightrocks.com/

And here something game related:
http://silverlightrocks.com/Communit...ght_games_101/

[Cortana]

Wot the silverlight test on that second link are really good. I especiall like the Dynamic Angle Joints example!

[MikeMD]

Where are the games? It's been in developers' hands for at least 8 months.

[AluminX]

yeah i've been looking at it closely the past 2 months. I've been pushed from my boss mostly. But yeah i hope it grows big and give flash a chanllenge. I believe there need to be something else other than flash.
The greatest thing that i like about it is that i can go and write code in javascript and i don't need to compile anything. What i don't like is that if it does become big, i'm sure that they will try to integrate it as much as they can with their .net framework leaving javascript behind and we have to go and learn C#. But other than my laziness of learning new syntax i think is a great application.

[tomsamson]

I´m not a lot into switching to Silverlight itself at the moment but i agree that competition is good, i hate it if one company dominates the market and can for example start lying to its customers and those have no other option than accept that and go on using the products of that company, so i´m thinking more about some things recently, too.

[SaphuA]

Wow Tom, is it me or did that last sentence make no sence at all? Your right though, having some compeition is good for the Flash people I guess. It'll lower the chances of crappy new IDE's or players getting released

AluminX, thanks for sharing your experiences.

MikeMD, the first versions of Silverlight were quite hard to do something with as it had hardly any features compared to the current release. I think we'll have to be patient. Plus that the link I provided does have game related stuff

[MikeMD]

the first versions of Silverlight were quite hard to do something with as it had hardly any features compared to the current release. I think we'll have to be patient

That was sort of my point

We have Director, and we've had things like wild tangent in the past, and other Microsoft and adobe efforts, and they all failed.

It's not just flash market penetration. It's the fact that you can do things fairly quickly, and also people with good ideas, but without doctorates in different languages, could make a game.

Of course this leads to a lot of crap games, but it's still an advantage.
If it's too difficult, or takes too long to develop games it will fail.

Look at it from clients' point too.

Flash game $xxxx 4-6 weeks of development time 95% market penetration
Silverlight game $xxxxx 8 - 12 weeks of development time , 10% market penetration.

Then the client says: "But the Silverlight game will be much better"

And you say: "not really"

What will the client choose?

[SaphuA]

I think Silverlight will be used for more serious applications anyway. It's a lot easier to create a Picture Slider (or even a Movie Slider) in Silverlight than it is in Flash. Silverlight has great Databinding capabilities and the Brushes rock too.

[Cimmerian]

Why the SilverLight game would be better?

[Squize]

"Then the client says: "But the Silverlight game will be much better""

A client putting game quality before cost ?

Can't see that being an issue

Squize.

[Sietjp]

As far as I'm concerned, the only things that matters (at least for game developement) is performances and market penetration.

I agree the microsoft developement (and debugging) environnement will certainly far better than the flash IDE.
Silverlight is not the only competitor, there is an excellent plateform dedicated to games that allows web publishing and 3D ready:
Unity web player : http://unity3d.com/unity-web-player-2.x.html
Unity game example : http://splume.flashbangstudios.com/play.php

The Flash 10 with hydra and hardware accelerated filters will be a big step forward for Flash. As far as I can know Silverlight is not yet hardware accelerated.

[Cimmerian]

Silverlight is not the only competitor, there is an excellent plateform dedicated to games that allows web publishing and 3D ready:
Unity web player : http://unity3d.com/unity-web-player-2.x.html
Unity game example : http://splume.flashbangstudios.com/play.php

Unity is were Tom Higgins went to work after leave Adobe
Yeah, it would be a good option if it wasnt by the small penetration

[tomsamson]

The Flash 10 with hydra and hardware accelerated filters will be a big step forward for Flash.

Slow there with such assumptions, as we know from past and recent experience marketing stunt presentation statements made at some conference are nothing more than that until the product is available in release version and you can test it for a while yourself.
First of all there wasn´t even anything announced about hardware support for the new filters in flash, next up i´d be highly critical about the performance at which those (in flash not hardware supported) filters run before i haven´t tried them.
hydra is meant to allow coding filters/effects in a custom language with the intention to use em accross multiple technologies,tools etc.
In flash those filters will probably at best run at the same speed as the currently available filters (i´ll think so until i try em in flash and see its not the case).
Its nice to have believe in positive evolution but yeah, better don´t believe the hype machine too early, otherwise your disapointment afterwards may just be quite big if the hype turns out not to be deserved.

[AluminX]

Bear in mind that silverlight is on its beta stages and it is in no shape(yet) to compete with flash which is in its 9th version.

[MikeMD]

Silverlight is not the only competitor, there is an excellent plateform dedicated to games that allows web publishing and 3D ready:

So was Wild Tangent, about 6-8 years ago. Where is it now?

I'm pretty sure that the only competition to flash, for at least another 2-3 years will be director. It's around and it does 3D. These newcomers don't seem to offer anything that we haven't seen before, and it's difficult to just start from nothing and compete with flash which everybody already has installed, and director which is probably on around 60-70% of computers.

It's like expecting another search engine to pop up and dethrone google and yahoo. Don't see it happening soon.

[tomsamson]

you gave a good example yourself there by talking about yahoo and google.
Imagine how big and undisputed yahoo was before google shaped up?
Yahoo hasn´t gone away, but yeah, google became the dominating force in that sector in a rather short while.
In the tech, especially web tech world radical swap overs from one tech dominating to the other tech dominating are possible within 1-2 years, happened in shorter while several times.

Just imagine Adobe releasing one super bugged IDE and Player Version and MS at the same time releasing one wicked comparable product and it could go quickly.


Sure with things like flash there´s always the player adoption rate topic, well, on that end MS unlike any wannabe flash contender before has the huge advantage that they can bundle their tech with the OS (and roll out constant updates with the usual "security" updates most windows users have enabled).

I don´t want to paint an all black picture for the flash platform, its dominating the market and has done so for a long while, but yeah, we as developers, just like Adobe shouldn´t be THAT sure flash will always be the leader as it is. If Adobe screws up too much on some ends or some other tech just gets way more attractive to developers or the audience things can change.

That´s really the major reason why i moan so much about several flash related issues recently, i want to stick with the flash platform but i see some things evolving in drections i don´t like where i see at the same time strong contenders like MS shaping up and that makes me think about what´s going on, i´d like flash to evolve nicely for the best of all of us, but yeah, that can´t happen if we close our eyes and pretend contenders aren´t shaping up and also that there aren´t any issues with the flash platform which should be addressed.

[tomsamson]

to MikeMD regarding what you said on director: director is no contender for flash for lots of reasons, some of them are:
-comes from the same company
-you can embed flash content in director content (so they aren´t meant as contenders but as symbions )
-director hasn´t been propperly developed further for ages and its market penetration is sinking while the one of flash is growing

[MikeMD]

I see why you wouldn't consider director competition, but I still view it as such.

I think people make mistake of getting excited about 3D in flash ( papervision, etc ) while ignoring 3D games done with director. I think that is the standard to shoot for. Look at Miniclip ( the most successful gaming portal ) and see how many more director titles they have these days. So if you can't duplicate , or at least do games as good as that in flash, you better learn lingo. It's definitely a competition.

I don't see any problems with flash so far. Microsoft has tried before and failed. If they succeed this time , then we have another platform, but I doubt they'll have anything worthy within the next 2 years ( if ever ). For example, your recent complaint was about speed of the latest version, and I'm always for improvement in that area, but Silverlight doesn't even have any games to test with. Who knows what's going on there. They have to show that it's just as easy as flash to develop for, high penetration trate, and superior performance, or at least as good as director in 3D area. And they have to prove it with a killer game or games. So far they have absolutely nothing.

In the tech, especially web tech world radical swap overs from one tech dominating to the other tech dominating are possible within 1-2 years, happened in shorter while several times

That happens in every sector in early stages. We are beyond that point. It would be much more difficult to dethrone google now, just like it's impossible to do anything about the dominance of Windows.

[Sauceofallevils]

Those are interesting examples. Some of the stuff I seen previously to this is: http://silverlight.net/community/gal...&sort=1#vid723

I think Silverlight has a lot of potential, will have to see how it evolves in the future. Flash has had a bit of a head start on Silverlight, but Silverlight still might be able to become better then Flash. We'll have to see. Thanks for showing me those neat examples.

[tomsamson]

I see why you wouldn't consider director competition, but I still view it as such.

ok

I think people make mistake of getting excited about 3D in flash ( papervision, etc ) while ignoring 3D games done with director. I think that is the standard to shoot for. Look at Miniclip ( the most successful gaming portal ) and see how many more director titles they have these days. So if you can't duplicate , or at least do games as good as that in flash, you better learn lingo. It's definitely a competition.

I´m not into making director level 3d games. Neither am i extremely excited about using papervision (or some other as3 3d engine) to make 3d games.
I think both are nice for some limited use cases (those are way more limited in flash than director right now of course) and are therefore not something i´m hurrying to get into. Nice to doodle around with it, do a game with it if i feel like it and it matches the needs, but yeah, everything else than ideal in my eyes.
Again, i´m not asking for hardware support just and only to do 3d stuff; i´m asking for it as as it is flash´s performance just sucks on display side.

re Silverlight/MS:

...They have to show that it's just as easy as flash to develop for, high penetration trate, and superior performance, or at least as good as director in 3D area.

Director is more than 5 years behind compared to what can be done on the 3d side in other web technologies and still those others haven´t reached the popularity of director yet, that shows that 3d alone right now doesn´t make or break the dominance force of a technology on the web.
Developing content on the flash platform becomes more and more complex,time and ressource intensive with every update, its only easy as you make it up to be if someone still doodles around in as1/flash ide (which has several downsides regarding code editor functionality, coding flexibility/capabilities, performance etc etc.)
If one codes in AS3 in eclipse/flex builder and next to that creates art assets in flash or some other tool, then works on combining all and getting a nice group workflow going where designers and coders can work together that is way more comparable to (more complex) workflow as with java or MS rivaling technologies.
Regarding penetration rates Adobe heavily relies on content creators making great things in their tech which in return makes users download the runtime to enjoy it.
MS has the advantage that they can bundle their tech with the OS and therefore catch up on penetration rates rather quickly and keep it at constant high/increasing levels.
Regarding performance i expect the performance of MS contender ware to exceed the one of Adobe products if Adobe doesn´t get rolling faster on that end (since having your tech more integrated into the OS and overall also with closer hardware level (access) surely will once in full force allow quite high performance on MS tech/environment).
Again, flash is the dominating force and i also think that will probably stay like that for 2-3 years on the web field. Just also think it can stay like that even longer but equally realistically turn the other way round if Adobe messes up within that timespan.


regarding in the tech, especially web tech world radical swap overs happening from one dominating to the other tech dominating:

That happens in every sector in early stages. We are beyond that point. It would be much more difficult to dethrone google now, just like it's impossible to do anything about the dominance of Windows.

It happens in every sector but all the time, not just in early stages. Regarding the web you could have talked about really early stages as the late 70ies/ 80ies, not the late ninenties and nowadays, where we still have such things happening all the time.
Don´t ever say never when its about technology/software. Of course some other OS could beat Windows´dominance.
The comparison with our topic here is weak though, because even though any software/tech can be outbeaten by another any day, in some cases its of course more unlikely than in others.
With OS its not just as likely in quick turnaround because there´s a lot of change in workflow and a massive costs for the end user involved.
With flash content its something different, an end user doesn´t have to care at all whether the content in the browser is made using flash or some MS tech. If he requires an MS tech runtime to enjoy content he´ll probably get that, if he doesn´t have to install it as it comes with his OS even better to him.
For content creators it will boil down to several factors influencing which technology/platform they want to develop in, which package makes the impression as best choice overall or just for some specific things, well,we´ll see.