3D Textured Silverlight and Silverlight 3D Engine
July 15, 2007 — drawkSample Silverlight textured 3d in a pretty slick Vista Silverlight theme. It is a pretty impressive demo that is full screen app and a slight performance test with the 3d in it.
I would love for some kits like papervision3d, Sandy etc to be ported to Silverlight. There are some other early 3d works from bubblemark, a 3D engine recently released in early stages called Balder (source at codeplex), pageturns, and more but it is still pretty young.
Sample Textured Silverlight 3d Vista demo
3D Engine for Silverlight Alpha 1.1
But until Silverlight is available in the market it will hard to justify projects in it unless they are demos or technology show pieces. When it hits around 85% market availability and is finalized (it is currently 1.1 Alpha) it could be dangerous.
July 15, 2007 at 8:33 pm
“I would love for some kits like papervision3d, Sandy etc to be ported to Silverlight. “
Why? Do you have difficulties using those technologies today?
And what probability do you assess the chance that any such future plugin will be kept updated on 85% of the world’s machines?
jd/adobe
July 15, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Hey John,
No they are great today. AS3 is the only possible way for 3d in flash to be usable. Silverlight doesn’t stand a chance until it has the same and the type of market penetration that Flash has, which might be never.
I am just tracking these two technologies as a developer/architect and seeing what they can do. I welcome competition and it would be wise of Silverlight to adopt similar frameworks that allow for developers to easily develop on either platform. Much like Java did for C# with kits like NUnit, NDoc, NAnt, etc.
July 15, 2007 at 11:44 pm
“Silverlight doesn’t stand a chance until it has the same and the type of market penetration that Flash has”
I’d like to throw up that it’s not so much as the market penetration as far as raw percentage, but the reach - the platforms it runs on that will be the big thing.
the last thing we need is the browser wars-like versioning all over again.
and while a certain Microsoft employee I know may bleat on about Apple being a rounding error in Microsoft’s eyes, the holy grail is (for me) cross-platform usability…
… and that goes for AIR too.
July 15, 2007 at 11:58 pm
I agree browser wars aren’t fun much but they also, if there are few enough, put competition and features. I think having two vector toolkits for RIA and games is not bad but yes it will fragment. Will all mobile devices support one or the other, will flash be hindered in future versions of windows or not included in IE revisions. Lots of questions but competition isn’t bad.
July 16, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[...] 3D Textured Silverlight and Silverlight 3D Engine Sample Silverlight textured 3d in a pretty slick Vista Silverlight theme. It is a pretty impressive demo that is full […] [...]
July 24, 2007 at 9:10 am
[...] I found this Slovenian promotional website for Windows Vista, which is a full screen browser application done using Silverlight, from this post here. [...]
May 14, 2008 at 9:28 am
Silverlight will come with all new PCs, all new versions of IE, and IE patches. IE only has 90% penetration, so I can see where you might be concerned with getting the Silverlight plug-in out to the masses.
There won’t be a browser war, really. I see ASP.Net developers adopting Silverlight over Flash because they already know how to program Silverlight if they do .Net. Microsoft doesn’t do things better, they make things easier for developers (and hopefully end users, but debatable).
Flash will be included with IE, I’m sure. But, if you’re a development house that is starting new additions and work in .Net, I don’t see why you’d choose Flash over Silverlight after the 2.0 release.
This brings me back to the days when .Net first came out (1.0-yuk) and everyone laughed because it was esentially “a broken version of java for MS developers”. That lasted maybe 2 years before .Net became a dominent force. I see this over-taking Flash in the next year or so unless Flash changes to do their coding in Java instead of action script (and a paradigm shift in how Flash is developed to be more OO-friendly).
In the end, the client doesn’t care what their app is developed in. They just want it quick and pretty.