Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Wild pockets wins!

I wanted to share with everybody my comparison of Wild pockets engine and Silverlight.
This comparison addresses very specific needs. What I'm trying to compare is the framework's capacity for fast development of single player casual games.


Wild Pockets Silverlight
Plugin installation 0 0 I don't like installing things. I usually don't install anything in my browser that doesn't come from Microsoft, Adobe or Sun. I'm very happy with my Flash player alone.
Development environment 1 0 Just installed one small-sized ActiveX instead of the full stack of Visual Studio + SP + Silverlight tools + Expression Blend.
Environment 1 1 Wild pockets have a nice builder tool to start with. It needs polishing. It lacked a code editor but I liked the ability of using my choice of text editor (Notepad++) for the code. The Visual Studio IDE is far superior though.
Jumpstart 1 0 Open the public gallery and drag objects approach of Wild pockets provides a really fast jump start. Having something running in Silverlight took a little bit longer.
Examples 1 1 The number of examples available in Wild pockets is pretty limited but the open in builder link was very useful. On the other hand, Silverlight has many examples posted everywhere, it's just a matter of downloading the files.
Reusable components 1 1 Wild pockets offer a limited but very usable gallery of components. The quality is not very high but this will probably change when they begin monetizing the environment. Silverlight in the other hand is backed by multiple libraries (see codeplex.com)
Creating components 0 0 I didn't like not being able to "draw" in either of them. Silverlight at least has the Expression Blend, but I didn't like the XAML thing.
Importing resources 0 1 Wild pockets has a pretty limited uploading interface and for 3D objects it only enables you to export them from Maya or 3D Max using their custom exporters. Visual studio allows you to reference dll or use any other file that will be packed at build time.
Built-in features 1 0 Wild pockets has a nice phisics engine and an average 3D renderer. I experimented with the beta particle engine. It was nice having all this out of the box. Input handling was pretty easy from keyboard, but a little bit more challenging from the mouse. In Silverlight you either do it yourself or get libraries from around.
Programming language 1 1 I liked the scripting approach and I picked Lua very easily. Microsoft opted for typed languages (although IronRuby may be coming) and all related pros and cons. I like the ability of choosing VB or C# and I really like the later.
First prototyping 1 0 After studying some examples I started my own project. I got the Wild pockets prototypes working really fast. It took me a while to figure out how Silverlight really works.
Documentation 0 1 The build in documentation in Wild Pockets is just ok and not being able to browse it and search from the browser got me angry. The documentation and tutorials are faulty and outdated. The code completion feature of Visual Studio, MSDN and Google provide enough documentation to make me happy.
Power and performance 0 0 Wild pockets slowed my machine when I had many things going on. The collision detection requieres heavy processing power and the particle system reduced my frame rate too much too often. Silverlight 2D vector drawing was fast enough but limited.
Stability 0 0 Both crashed my browser several times. Wild pockets even gave me a BSoD before I updated my graphics driver.
Building 0 0 Wild pockets is interpreted but one needs to save and let the system upload the script file to the server. Silverlight needs to be compiled. Drawn here.
Learning curve 1 0 In one week I learned Wild pockets, got my prototype working and in a couple of weeks I cleaned it enough to be satisfied with the results. I haven't got a working prototype with Silverlight in the same time.
Capabilities. 0 0 Both are limited. I like 2D games and it was tricky getting it working with Wild pockets. Silverlight in the other hand is 2D only excluding a bunch of other people.
Game development 1 0 Clearly Wild pockets is aimed at game development making it very easy to get a game working. Silverlight is more generic allowing it to be useful for a wide range of tasks non specific to game development.
Ownership 0 1 I have the sources of my Silverlight apps stored in my computer and I will publish a binary file on the Internet. In the other hand, Wild pockets has all my source files and resources in their server.

Conclusions: Gather your own. I have many coming soon.

1 comment:

  1. Just an after comment,
    If I had to compare Adobe Flash using the same criteria, it would score 16 points. 10 went to Wild pockets and 7 to Silverlight.
    Some additional weighting should be made regarding plugin penetration. That would put Flash way ahead of the other two and would even Wild pockets and Silverlight a little bit more.

    ReplyDelete

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