PlayBits Limited Beta 1 Release
With the launch of Silverlight 3, we’ve rolled out the first round Early Adopter Beta testing over the weekend. Participants were selected from the first few that contacted us directly. We’ve kept the pool of first round of Beta testers small to limit the impacts of any breaking changes to the framework. Once the first round of testers have taken a couple weeks to go through the SDK, we should be able to expand the testing population even more to include additional game developers.
In the meantime, the PlayBits Silverlight game engine is getting a new home at www.playbits.com. This new dedicated Website will be online soon and take over with detailed product updates, demo games, support forums, and more. Also, Josef Rogovsky will take on the task of providing further product updates and developer relations.
As for the game engine itself, it has been updated to incorporate the very latest changes in Silverlight 3. There’s now full support for GPU hardware acceleration, which has dramatically increased performance. There’s complete support for pixel shader effects. Also, the game engine footprint size has come down significantly, resulting in even faster download time.
We’re very excited to take PlayBits to the next level of Early Adopter Beta testing and then onwards to full product release. We’re encouraged and excited about the flood of responses we’re getting from interested developers and want to do everything we can to ensure that PlayBits will meet your needs to quickly develop feature-rich games for the Web.
I was interested in signing up for the EA program. Can I still get into it? The pricing for EA’s is damn nice.
The Early Adopter program is still going to be open to the public with our upcoming Beta2 release and still at the EA price. The limited Beta1 participants are largely performing an API shakedown with ‘throw-away’ test projects. We expect the EA program to be open to everyone in just a couple of weeks.
John K.