October, 2009
Thanks a lot to Microsoft!
I was awarded MVP Client App Dev for all my contributions in 2009 towards the community.
I am very happy and this encourages me to continue the hard work on Quakelight and all my other Silverlight projects.
Quake in Silverlight 3.0 available with full GPL source code! July 25, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
For some people, this could may be the best news of the year.
I finally took time to update Quake in Silverlight to the latest version of Silverlight: Silverlight 3.0.
I consider this is still a demo and not the real game yet because there are still bugs I am desperately trying to fix (any help welcomed).
Not only this, but I also released the full source code of Quakelight.
Quake source code is GPL hence Quakelight source code is too.
Contributions or fixes are welcomed so do not hesitate to contact me.
Last but not least, you can see that the homepage has changed with the introduction of a new project: SilverTonic.
More information is available on this on my French blog (with a now obsolete SilverStone name).
Basically, this is a very ambitious project (a lot more than Quakelight actually). I am nicely progressing on it and I have great expectations on what it could become (this is a project with wide perspectives).
UPDATED
Russian events and news May 29, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
I just wanted to report about two events in Russia where QuakeLight was demoed, even at a Flash games conference! You can have a look here.
In the meantime, we are still actively working on different projects (three developers on three different projects).
More news and screenshots soon!
New blog and new DEMO! March 21, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
First of all, I would like to welcome my very own blog regarding Silverlight. Silverlight Underground will be the weekly counterpart of InnoveWare Solutions with articles, source codes and more.
Second important information is the availability of a first demo of Quakelight. This is an experimental demo using Silverlight 3 Beta newest features so please only try it if you are a developer. More information here.
Post-Tech Days 2009 February 20, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
The Microsoft Tech Days 2009 event is now over!
This was really cool to be there. I wish to thanks again the Microsoft France guys for their invitation.
I did a ten minutes presentation of Quakelight and that was pretty cool with the big screen and sound speakers.
More to come:
- The webcast of the presentation.
- Slides and session notes.
- A more detailed making of the project.
- Libraries with their source code.
Tech Days, DevDays, QuakeDays... February 6, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
In France, we have the Microsoft Tech Days event. In Portugal, they have soon the Microsoft DevDays event.
Our new partner FullSIX Portugal will demonstrate Quakelight there. More info here.
New teasing video... February 3, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
The guys from Microsoft France created a cool video about Quakelight for the Microsoft Tech Days event, starting in seven days here in Paris.
Do not miss the main developer session and the advanced Silverlight session! You can see the new video here.
Updates... January 23, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
First of all, I updated the QuakeLight page regarding our participation to Microsoft/Silverlight events this year. You can have a look here.
Also, I have a first screenshot to show about Monkeylight.
Despite several glitches, this looks already very promising and we are eager to play!
A taste of things to come... January 5, 2009 - by Julien Frelat
There are interesting forthcoming Silverlight events early this year (MIX09, TechDays 2009, Platforma.ru 2009).
We might participate so keep an eye on the demos...
I also have news to share about our expanding line of Silverlight products for 2009:
Quakelight (Quake Silverlight port)
3D engine is almost finished. There is now weapon display, light effects and all clipping issues were fixed.
I also implemented a preliminary sound engine that bring 3D spatialization effects and ambient sounds to the game. There are still a few issues to fix though.
Silvercard (Arcade Game emulator)
Not much on this project. There is only one Z80 arcade game emulated (a Puyo-Puyo clone game called News).
I plan to add support for keyboard controls and sound.
Monkeylight (ScummVM Silverlight port)
This project is progressing nicely, focusing on bringing online the famous LucasArts Monkey Island game.
We expect first screenshots soon.
Quakelight 2 (Quake 2 Silverlight port)
Quake 2 source code being a lot cleaner than the Quake 1 source code, we decided to create a C to C# conversion tool.
This helps to develop faster the project and should be useful for other similar projects.
The tool will be available for free to download and use on your own projects.
Updated web site! December 3, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
I found time to update the whole web site (there is more to come) and I hope you will like it.
Progress reports on our various projects will be back soon too.
And the winner is... BaracQuake 2! November 8, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
There were more than 1200 votes on the poll so I guess it was time to stop and display the results.
Here are my comments on the poll results.
All projects are in my opinion all very interesting to do.
There are however projects that overlap, doing one means there is less interest to work on another one.
Clearly, it seems everyone really want 3D in silverlight.
1. The big winner. A port of the id Software Quake II game is logically the next step after the Quake I port. They share most of the same source code so it could be fast to have something working.
As soon as QuakeLight will be in its final stage for a release, I could start QuakeLight2.
2. An OpenGL library would be a nice addition. A first driver implementation would be software emulation only as currently there are no native 3D API in Silverlight. In the future, if Microsoft integrates 3D, a second driver could be added as a wrapper.
MesaGL is a very good open-source implementation of OpenGL so it could be used as a base for this project.
Of course, software rendering is very slow compared to native or hardware-accelerated. Perhaps only a subset of OpenGL would be implemented, I have to experiment first to see how well it performs in C#/Silverlight.
This is a big project here...
3. A custom and simple 3D engine. This one really depends on the success of the OpenGL library idea. If the OpenGL library is really too much work, a little custom 3D engine project could be a nice idea. It could be used for small projects or 3D demos.
This could start little and grow faster if there are many contributions or help on this.
4. An arcade machine emulator would be quite easy to develop. We have previous experience on this (JAPE, CottAGE), there is a great documentation project, namely MAME. Also, this project was already started as I have a working driver for the arcade game News (see screenshot below).
5. Port of other retro 3D games. It seems everyone want Doom. Among possible portable games, we have also Hexen, Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, Descent, Wolfenstein 3-D...
6. A Flash 9/AS3 emulation library. We already started experimenting on this and there is a very valuable source of inspiration at Shine Draw. There are actually two ideas here, either extend the set of Silverlight APIs with Flash bits or port Flash APIs to Silverlight. In any case, you could more easily port Flash code with this and you could have missing features in Silverlight be available as Flash-like APIs.
7. 2D Point&Click adventure games (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle...) -or- a PC/Ms-Dos emulator. If the second one is working nicely, there is no need for the first one. And if really it performs well, there is even no need for Quake or Quake II or other game ports... Well, I'll maybe see later for these projects...
As a funny note, it seems we have pro-Flash and pro-Java people visiting the site. They are maybe jealous because no-one is porting Quake on their platform. They would be happy to know that Adobe cross-compiled Quake in Flash and Jake2 is a nice Java/OpenGL port of Quake II...
For your information, here are other worthy suggestions for Silverlight projects:
- Yamaha MSX, Commodore 64, Nintendo GBA emulators
- Second life client
- Processing.org port
- Google Charts API port
Better, faster... Silverlight 2 RC0 is a winner! October 11, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
I installed today the RC0 version of Microsoft Silverlight 2.
I must say it really worths it, the performance boost in Quake Light is simply amazing...
Basically with the new runtime:
Fullscreen mode and scaling are faster and there is nearly no FPS loss to use them.
The framerate is now very accurate and Silverlight do not try anymore to catch up so the rendering remains smooth and there are no lags anymore.
My rendering techniques are hopefully still working and are even faster in this version.
The overall performance of C# and Silverlight rendering is impressive compared to the previous version.
I updated the performance tests as shown in the following table:
Silverlight 2 RC0
Silverlight 2 beta 2
320 x 240
104 FPS
80 FPS
640 x 480
47 FPS
30 FPS
800 x 600
35 FPS
20-25 FPS
1024 x 768
22 FPS
N/A
(Tested with a PC Intel P4 3.2 Ghz and Internet Explorer 7)
Silverlight 3D performance October 6, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
I added support for shadow effects and lightning effects (torchs, explosions) to QuakeLight and this looks very nice now.
I am still working on adding skin models and this should be soon finished.
In the meantime, I also tested the Silverlight 3D performance on my computer, increasing the resolution of the rendered scenes.
Here are my results so far with an Intel P4 3.2 Ghz, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and Internet Explorer 7:
320 x 240 - 60 FPS (this is the default Silverlight framerate limit).
640 x 480 - 30 FPS.
800 x 600 - 20-25 FPS.
Adding a 2x scale with the 640 x 480 resolution (no FPS loss!), and pressing F11 (full-screen), you have a full-screen Quake with nice textures and decent speed...
Future optimizations will certainly improve the smoothness but the current results are already very good!
Texture mapping in Silverlight! September 21, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
I added full support for texture mapping, fixed the camera bug... and discovered a new visibility bug.
Once I get rid of this one, only left are skin models (weapon, monsters) and of course the game engine.
Here is the current status on this project:
Correct BSP support.
Texture mapping rendering (with mipmapping and surface cache).
Faces rendering (no polygons or triangles yet).
Submodels rendering (moving walls, floors and doors).
Particles rendering.
Simple sprite rendering (no animated sprites yet).
3D in Silverlight! September 12, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
After hours of work and several nasty bugs to fix, I finally got 3D to be displayed.
As for now, I only implemented flat mode rendering.
You can notice annoying bugs with the camera (a bit nervous when moving and there is a dead angle view whenever you hit something).
Of course the video is not as smooth as the real thing but this gives a good idea of what Silverlight can achieve with 3D...
Simple sprite rendering (no animated sprites yet).
Warp effect.
No sky or turbulent rendering yet.
Palette effects.
Partial client/server support.
Demo playback (no real game logic yet).
A little Silverlight Quake Video August 25, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
I post today a video of my current progresses on the SilverLight port of Quake.
Particles were added but seems a bit buggy. There is still a lot of work before getting some other 3D stuff displayed...
I apologize for the poor quality and speed of this demo movie. The video recording removed about 10 FPS on the game and the codec is maybe not the more appropriate.
I will try to do better next time... If you know a good recording software, feel free to tell me.
Update: I removed this obsolete video.
Silverlight August 19, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
New screenshots of QuakeLight, the Silverlight port of the id Software Quake game.
Menu is working perfectly and ingame demos too. Only missing is the 3D rendering engine...
I require several days of work to have this finished... but it will worth it!
Silverlight August 10, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
As promised, here are two screenshots of the projects I am currently working on using SilverLight.
Expect more work-in-progress updates like this one in the following days.
I like holidays... Free Time. Baby Sitting. SilverLight Coding Fun.
Silverlight July 29, 2008 - by Julien Frelat
I started experimenting recently with Microsoft Silverlight and this is very promising.
I quickly port a Z80 core and the driver for the arcade game News from my Sagecott Java sources.
This works like a charm and is about twice fast as the same code in Java!
I will post more information in the following days as I progress on the development of these new projects (I have several...).
More news to come...
News summary
