I have played a bit with expression blend and the physics behaviors of andy beaulieu. Can’t wait to have such a workflow with a full game engine. Blend seems really smart. Any news for the public beta release date?

The delayed release is tied somewhat to Expression Blend’s delay, but mostly tied to our desire to make sure that the public interfaces into the game engine are finalized. Even last week, there were some renaming of public methods which caused all of the samples to be changed. But the end result is a framework that is very intuitive and tied in well with the Silverlight SDK.

2D Light effects are definitely on the radar, but not in the initial release. The first release will include a simple drop shadow for game objects, but they will be projected at a fixed (programmer defined) angle. However, that does keep the door open for a new pixel shader effect in which you can specify a light source and then let the shadows drop naturally.

This, along with a larger collection of pixel shader effects, will be coming soon as they begin to really differentiate a Silverlight Web game from a Flash game.

John K.

The other factor was that Silverlight 3 was released, but not Expression Studio 3. Microsoft has delayed that release for a couple of weeks and Expression Blend is our recommended game level editor.

We really want this product released as quickly as possible. But only in a way that developers can take it and run with it as opposed to running into problems wih a changing API.

John K.

3 Quick Questions
1. How was the silverlight 3.0 launch event in San Francisco?
2. Are there great changes so that the release needs to be delayd?
3. Do you plan support for light effects? (I always hoped that feature would come to gg tgb but I think there I have to wait until the next major release)

John K.

John K.

Good job!