The doors to the new big "online casual games"-site (http://silverarcade.com/) has opened! 

The site currently holds 9 games, but it's a start and I guess it will grow fast. I know I will do what I can to put games on the site. This site is interessed both for Silverlight game developers and casual online game players.

For Silverlight game developers the site gives you a great possiblity to show off your game and have people playing an enjoying your game. I don't know if it is on the roadmap, but maybe there could be a possiblity for the community to give you feedback on your game to improve it. Besides that you will also be paid based on the plays of your game. (This isn't there now, but they promise it will come and it will be based on income from ads). Further more, a site like this will make the penetration of Silverlight rise (we currently have a penetration of ~24% (http://www.riastats.com).

For online casual game players this is a great site to spend some time on, as Silverlight gives a new group of people the possiblity to create games for the web, which gives some new games to the players. So users/players of casual games could have many fun hours on the site as the number and quality of the games grows.

I have one game on the site for now, Bubbles, which can be played here: http://silverarcade.com/Games/Laumania/Bubbles 

- Enjoy! 

This is actually an “old” video from MIX08, but it’s still a good one. It’s about a game developed in Silverlight 2 that is running on miniclip.com.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/CT03

- Enjoy!

Over at Silverlight Games 101 Bill Reiss and some other guys have started or actually, are about to, start af new Silverlight game site similar to Miniclip.com.

The site should go live in March and I'm looking very much forward to this as I guess it will give the Silverlight game community a good place to show of their games and in turn put even more focus on Silverlight as a gaming platform.

The site currently doesn't have any content and is only a splash screen with their new logo, but be sure to check out the site during March 2009.

Visit silverarcade.com

The other day I were reading some great articles about creating a game step-by-step by Joel Neubeck. I looked at the source code and saw that he were placing his sprites different then what I have seen before. I wrote a comment to Joel on his blog. You can read it here.

Untill now I have only seen samples, and have also only done it this way myself, of placing sprites using a Canvas and the attached properties Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top. This have worked fine for others and for me.

By looking at Joels source code I saw that he were using a Grid as his container to hold his sprites and the a TranslateTransform to place them on the Grid.

Well, I know, the outcome is the same, but it made me think if there actually were a performance difference. So I desided to do a little test my self. I build two small Silverlight applications, both with the same content - balls bouncing around. One is using a Grid as the container and the other a Canvas.

You can see the samples live here:

Canvas sample

Grid sample

You can download the source code from here.

To me they look exactly the same. As you can see, if you run Firefox, that I have enabled the FrameRateCounter and have set the mas framerate to 9999. On my computer these are pretty much the same all the time. In Chrome I can see the memory useage of the silverlight plugin and that seems to be the same as well.

• So, are they actually performing the same or am I testing this the wrong way?
• Do you have any better way of testing this?
• Does it perform differently on your computer?

Please let me know, as I think this is very good to know for all us game developers :)

A while ago I was talking with another game developer (Cameron) and was showing him some of the prototype games I have made over the last year and a half. As I was browsing through my "Projects" folder on my desktop, I discovered some old games that I almost forgot about.

Today I desided to put them on my site here. So please go to the "My Projects" site and start downloading.