I’ll be at MIX11 on Wednesday April 13th to talk about a fantastic new feature coming to Silverlight 5 – 3D Graphics! I hope you can make the session or check it out online.
Silverlight 3D Graphics at MIX11
Posted in: Graphics, Microsoft, Silverlight, Technology
– April 9, 2011
Will your sample code be posted anywhere? Trying to find a good hello world for SL5 3D.
@Karl: Yes, those are being packaged and will be posted in the next few days. I’ll make an announcement here once they’re online.
Post on samples is here:
http://aarononeal.info/?p=125
Hi Aaron, nice talk, and nice introduction to 3D concepts !
I was not physically at Mix so I pose my questions here :
– Shader Model 2 is quite limited (for complex pixel shaders with multiple dynamic lights, it’s really hard to keep below the 68 instruction limit). Could you enable Shader Model 3 ? (or at least Shader Model 2 capabilities with Shader Model 3 instruction count limit)
– Semantics and constant name bindings are not supported in current beta. I suppose that has to do with the fact that shaders must be executable on Windows as well as on the Mac and should rely only on the common subset of features available in Direct X and Open GL. Have you considered an other option like having to provide both HLSL and GLSL shaders for 3rd party apps to run cross platform ? (many shader authoring tools provide way to write shaders once and abstract specific language features using Macros)
This new version of Silverlight is really awesome, can’t wait to put my hands on the coming features (Render Targets for example in order to get shadow maps working)
Last thing, if you need a quick sample on how to build fancy effects like Normal Mapping, I made a port of the Xna Normal Mapping sample : http://www.simonferquel.net/blog/Dwarf5/DwarfSL5TestPage.html
@Simon: Glad you enjoyed the talk! Thanks for the feedback on Shader Model. I agree that would be great and we’re tracking the “HiDef” profile and higher shader models on our wish list for a future release.
On name bindings, those you can at least determine if you compile your HLSL to ASM and then parse the text in it which maps variable names to registers. Hopefully I’ll get some time to create a sample to show how this is done. One of the goals with the current solution was to enable 3rd parties to build their own “effects” system from the provided shader infrastructure.
Aaron,
thanks for this clear, informative and smooth presentation.
At the end of it you were asked whether the 3D aspects of SL5
would be available in the MacOSX version and your answer was not
very clear.
Can we assume that the final release of SL5 will provide the same level
of 3D/XNA support on both the Windows and MacOSX plateforms?
Philippe
@Philippe: Glad you enjoyed the presentation. Regarding the final feature set, we understand Mac support is important to customers and are investigating the experience that can be provided.
There is no doubt that a port of a part of XNA to MacOSX can be done.
It seems that you cannot make a firm announcement about this, which makes me a little nervous :-)!
Thanks for uploading the samples: they will help us getting started.