Developing games that work with both XNA and Silverlight

Yesterday I co-presented a session at GameFest 2008 on Silverlight game development, and one of the things I showed was a sample of abstracting out the differences between Silverlight and XNA so that you could write game code that would run against both.

The quick and dirty sample is here:

http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverlightxnasample.zip

I want your input, if something like this was built up into a game library that could run on both Silverlight and XNA and was available on CodePlex, would you be interested? It would be a fairly significant undertaking and I want to know whether people would find it worthwhile. I thought it might be a bit more relevant now that you'll be able to sell XNA Games on XBOX 360. 

Published Wednesday, July 23, 2008 4:54 PM by Bill Reiss

Comments

# re: Developing games that work with both XNA and Silverlight

I would find it worthwhile. Im jumping into xna this summer. I just make games in flash and now silverlight as a hobby, but im starting to get better i guess cause i won the RIA Run Contest.  Anyway I would love to get into XNA. Most if not all the games I build are small and simple enough that silverlight can handle. The are small games cause im just doing this in my spare time.  I would love to publish the games in both xna and silverlight without recoding it. The posiblitiy to sell games on the Xbox arcade really excites me.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 8:36 PM by roverhair

# re: Developing games that work with both XNA and Silverlight

Yes, please put something together on CodePlex.  I would definately use it.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 10:58 PM by chrisaswain

# re: Developing games that work with both XNA and Silverlight

I'm working on this same problem. But my main development library is Farseer.

My CodePlex game is here:

codeplex.com/silvertower

I don't have too much time right now but in next week I will spend maybe another hours for this project.

Thursday, July 24, 2008 4:55 AM by kierepka

# re: Developing games that work with both XNA and Silverlight

Not sure if it'll help you guys or not, but some of the SL demos I've done were based on XNA code (usually physics libraries).  I wrote a basic wrapper assembly ("XnaToWpf") originally for WPF but adapted for Silverlight.  All you need to do is include it in your SL project and you'll get [some of] the Microsoft.Xna.Framework namespace.  It only includes stuff I needed (basic 3D classes; placeholders where appropriate etc) but might be useful for someone.

You can grab the project source here: chriscavanagh.wordpress.com/.../silverlight-soft-body-physics-source-code

Friday, July 25, 2008 1:17 PM by BobStrogg