Is Silverlight 2.0 a viable game development platform?

Question

I've coded some smaller projects using Silverlight 2.0, which is fairly impressive.

Does Silverlight 2.0 have what it takes to be a game development platform for the web?
(Are the framerates high enough, will there be 3D engines developed, and many more questions)

Yes or no, with detail if desired, and why.

Answer 1

Silverlight is a very viable platform for 2D Web Games.

I built Diver with it and the development experience was very pleasant. I'm close to releasing my second game and this time the dev experience was even better because the tools were out of beta.

The only downside I see right now is the lack of support by web game portals and ad-revenue sharing sites like MochiAds

Without support from these kind of sites, your options to make money from your games will be a bit limited. Your best option for making money right now is to host your games on your own site with an Google adSense account.

I expect the web-game portals and other web-game services to add support for Silverlight once the plug-in becomes more ubiquitous and we reach a tipping point in the number of Silverlight games and game developers.

My advice: jump-in! The more people developing Silverliht games the quicker we will reach this tipping point.

Answer 2

Since Silverlight 2 is lacking 3D support or distort transforms or bitmap manipulation, you're pretty much limited to 2D sprite games, but you could make a good casual game, or even a physics-based game using the Farseer Physics Engine or something similar. The LineRider game was ported from Flash to Silverlight for performance reasons, since running a .Net framework inside the browser can give you performance gains over Flash. So if your game is computationally intensive, it might be the right platform for you now.

With some 3D support, hardware acceleration, and bitmap manipulation coming in Silverlight 3, I think it will then be a very compelling web game platform.

Even without these features, Innoveware has done a very impressive port of Quake to Silverlight, you can see it here:

http://www.innoveware.com/quakelight.html

The author uses some hacks to do scanline rasterization to a bitmap for his display, this will get a lot easier in Silverlight 3.

Answer 3

Well, Silverlight can be used for game development, just like Java can be used.

It is a very bad idea in my opinion, but it would be possible. If you are interested in developing a game for a web browser I would recommend Flash.

And why not use it anyway? It's been around for years, you'll probably be able to get LOTS of sample code you can just use and it is PROVEN as a games platform for the web.

Good luck with your game development. It's lots of fun :)