ChicagoDave
12/19/2008 11:10:00 PM
On Dec 19, 4:36 pm, Otto Grimwald
<contact_is_on_webs...@anamnese.fr.st> wrote:
> In addition, the mono implementation will always
> lag far behind the microsoft one.
Silverlight 2.0 was released at PDC in October.
Moonlight 2.0 will be released within 4-5 months of that date.
Doesn't seem like a huge lag to me. Since the desktop Linux
marketshare is fairly small, I'd say this is a fairly impressive
achievement.
In any case, using C# via the .NET Framework and Mono is a cost-
efficient methodology. Looking for cross-platform C++ developers to
work on back-ended contracts for text games would simply be
impossible. You have to understand what I'm trying to accomplish and
take that into the context of the resulting product and its available
platforms. In this case, Tenteo offered to help by building a UI in
Silverlight. What was I supposed to do, turn them down? Even if I held
some personal disdain for Microsoft, as a businessman, I'd be an idiot
to turn away from any viable solution.
But the decision to use Silverlight was a good one in all cases. If
one of my target markets is middle schools, then Silverlight might be
a great solution. I can provide access to an entire school system
without any major installations. We can either host it externally or
we can drop a server in the school system that hosts our games and
then it's just a matter of having the SL plug-in installed on all
desktops, no different than Flash is installed. A hosted system also
provides us the ability to implement market-testing and product-
testing without installation issues. Of course Flash would have
potnetially done the same, but I simply couldn't find anyone that
understood the complexities of marrying a VM to a flash front-end. I
could only find the people that knew how to make animations and
websites. That's not good enough for what the things I envision for
Textfyre games.
Of course if you're hell bent on avoiding MS technologies, there's
nothing I can do about that except make such a cool game that you
decide to hold your nose and install Silverlight or Moonlight
_anyway_.
David C.