The PlayBits launch date is now set in stone for July 10, 2009. We’ll launch with the same Early Adopter program described in the last post with the same benefits of discounted pricing, extended support service, and customer feedback driving direction. The EA program will end on August 31, 2009 as we formally launch the locked-down official release.

We originally targeted a release date of July 30, so why did we change it? Our original plan was to release a Silverlight 2.0 compatible version of PlayBits and then later a Silverlight 3.0 compatible version. This would have left 2 distinct versions of our SDK and tools out in the market. However, now that Microsoft has announced their July 10th launch date, we can align our product launch so that only one version of our game development SDK is out there. This means less confusion for everyone and sharper focus on our Silverlight 3.0 features and testing.

Over the next couple of weeks, leading up to our July 10 launch, several sample games will be posted to our Website for everyone to interact with and try out different features of the game engine. I will also be posting more videos and a detailed list of our features. Our online forums are also just about to open up so that we can start sharing answers to your questions.

• Immediate access to the PlayBits Silverlight game engine and tools
• Access to private online support forums
• Discounted price of $149, from the full retail price of $299
• Extended maintenance upgrade period
• Influence the direction and features of the engine

PlayBits is currenlty running fast and lean with Silverlight 2.0 and Expression Blend 2.5 and we’re already testing with the advanced features of Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3. The formal release of PlayBits 1.0 will coincide with the launch of Silverlight 3.0. But rather than keep everyone in the dark until then, we’re offering early and immediate access to the product, with a great price and lots of benefits.

Early Adopter licensing will come with immediate access to the PlayBits Forums. Our team will be active within the private forums, supporting questions, offering ideas, and more.

The retail price for the PlayBits Silverlight Game Engine is $299. The Early Adopter price comes with a big discount, priced at $149. When the final release launches, Early Adopters can immediately upgrade to the full release at no cost.

All PlayBits licenses come with a year of free maintenance updates. The Early Adopter licensees will receive the same year benefit beginning at the final release launch – plus – the period between Early Adopter purchase and the final release launch.

Early Adopters also have the advantage of infuencing the PlayBits team with product feedback, ideas, and feature requests. Our goal is to make Silverlight an amazing platform for Web game development and your Web game projects can help make that happen.

The Early Adopter program launches publicly on June 30, 2009 and will extend until the formal product release date this Fall. For questions about the release or the Early Adopter program, feel free to contact us at: contact@envygames.com .

It’s no doubt that Silverlight already offers amazing functionality and extensive support for images, sounds, videos, and animations right out of the box. But there’s much more needed to create feature-rich games for the Web. That’s why the PlayBits Silverlight Game Engine includes a solid foundation of game services, such as a flexible scene graph, resource management, physics processing, tick processing, along with a wide number of game objects, such as animated sprites, particles, tilemaps, etc. Together, they provide the game developer with a diverse set of tools for creating Web games.

The most effective feature of PlayBits is its wide collection of Game Components that are available to game developers. Components are discrete packages of game functionality that aggregate together to make a feature-rich game. Using game components is highly efficient and encourages code re-use within a game project and across multiple projects. PlayBits comes packaged with a few dozen components that range from player input and networking to path-following and health-level tracking. You can extend these components with your own custom code or create your own game components from scratch.

One of the most flexible collections is the state-machine related components, which significantly simplify game development. With the InputStateComponent, you can easily define keyboard input mappings that change a game object’s state. Then, with the AnimationStateComponent, you can playback different animations in response to the state change and even accompany it with different sounds delivered by the SoundStateComponent. Together, you can use these components to build the foundation of a game and then add the bits of C# code you need to customize your gameplay.

Another effective tool is the wide use of Events in PlayBits. Nearly all game engine classes and components expose a wide number of events for your game code to hook into. Everything from the end of a level loading to the changes in a game object’s state or reaching the end of a path exposes events that you can hook into. Events help reduce the amount of code needed by eliminating the need to sub-class parts of the library to add conditional checks. Instead, just hook into the events that your game is interested in and write a custom event handler method.

Instead of persisting game level definitions to some proprietary file format, the PlayBits Silverlight Game Engine defines level files as XAML markup. As result, a variety of XAML editing tools can be used to craft level files. Among them, Microsoft’s Expression Blend, which is a feature-rich visual editor that produces XAML markup. Expression Blend can drag & drop PlayBits game objects into a scene, change layouts, attach components, and edit properties.

With a strong foundation of game engine services, the efficiency of game components and events, and the drag & drop ease of Expression Blend, creating games for the Web with the PlayBits Silverlight Game Engine should be a snap. We’re getting very close to our initial release of PlayBits. More details about the engine, including videos and sample games, will be revealed as we get closer.  For more information about the PlayBits Silverlight Game Engine, please visit: http://www.envygames.com/content/?page_id=327.

Best of all, a few bytes of markup for a vector based game object can download a lot faster to the client’s Web browser than the hundreds or thousands of bytes that make-up an image. In the thumbnail image above, the two player ships and the asteroid are composed of polygons with a gradient fill. Here’s the XAML code for a player’s ship.

<Path Height="41" Width="25" Stretch="Fill" Stroke="#FFE62305" Data="M80,320 L96,280 L112,320 L96,312 z" x:Name="pathPlayer2" StrokeThickness="2" Canvas.Left="38" Canvas.Top="169">
 <Path.Fill>
  <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="0.5,1" StartPoint="0.5,0">
   <GradientStop Color="#FF350D04" Offset="0.582"/>
   <GradientStop Color="#FF000000" Offset="0"/>
  </LinearGradientBrush>
 </Path.Fill>
</Path>

The markup text comes to about 409 bytes and it could have been cleaned up a bit further. Below are three representations of the same player, but as images instead. On the left is a JPG file at high quality that comes to about 16,287 bytes. In the middle is a JPG set to low quality and it comes to 14,271 bytes – better, but looks terrible. On the right is our best option, a PNG file that comes to 3,888 bytes. At 4 KB, the PNG file looks the best and is the smallest – plus it comes with an alpha channer, gotta Love that format. But the bottom line is that even a 4,000 byte PNG file can’t match 400 bytes of markup.

 Another advantage that vector images have is scalability. Since Silverlight games can potentially run in full screen mode, vector-based art will look great at any level of scale. Images (even great looking PNG images) don’t scale up well, they just get blurry and fuzzy. But vector shapes will look sharp and crisp at any scale, just as a big 72-pt TrueType Font looks as great as its 12-pt counterpart. The scaling is mathematical.

Although there are a lot of benefits to vector-based graphics in Web games, I’m not suggesting that every Web game must be completely vector-based. However, you should consider how you can leverage vector art alongside images within a game. Here’s a great example from the PlayBits BlackJack demo as shown on the right. The playing card faces and backs are PNG images, but everthing else is markup. That includes the green background and the rounded buttons. As result, the game looks clean, it scales, and it loads fast.

The PlayBits Silverlight game engine offers built-in support for working with vector-shapes within your game. Just add a VectorShape scene object to the scene and point it to the Shape you want to use. You can then add any of the standard component you like, such as a MovementComponent to control it with the mouse or keyboard and the FarseerPhysicsComponent to add some rigid physics and collision ability or even the ConnectorComponent to attach a Shape to another scene object within the game. The video below demonstrates the VectorShape scene object in action to create a simple retro-arcade space game using Microsoft’s Expression Blend.

In any case, take a closer look at your Silverlight games to figure out how you can work-in vector-based graphics to either speed-up the load time or add presentation scalability.

PlayBits is full of game development features and is designed to be fast and easy to use. This includes new project templates for different types of games, a rich set of game services, a flexible component model, a powerful collection of game objects, and tight integration with Microsoft’s Expression Blend. Game objects include static sprites, animated sprites, scrolling sprites, particles, tilemaps, and more. Each of which is easily dragged, dropped, positioned, and sized within Expression Blend.

PlayBits also includes a collection of game components which incrementally adds functionality to each game object. Features range from player input capture to basic AI capability, to full-blown rigid physics, powered by the Farseer Physics Engine. Game components help a lot to keep the game code. Instead of placing a lot of code in a heavy hierarchical class library, code is added to game objects as needed by picking components and snapping them together to make more powerful game objects.

But the real focus of PlayBits is on the speed and size of games. Every effort to squeeze maximum performance out of Silverlight has been taken. PlayBits also takes advantage of Silverlight’s vector graphics services wherever possible. For example, instead of using an image for a sky background a gradient rectangle can be used; likewise, a cirle shape can be used for a particle effect.

PlayBits can be used to quickly and easily create a wide range from games from classic arcades and puzzle games to isometric RPG and real-time strategy games. The PlayBits game engine is expected to release this Spring and as it draws closer to release, more information about features, images, and sample games will be released.

Click Here, for more information about the PlayBits game engine for Silverlight.