Game Development Community

Wpf

by Chris Kim · in Torque X 2D · 02/29/2008 (9:13 pm) · 5 replies

Anyone cares?

#1
03/01/2008 (8:14 pm)
I guess not so many cares but I thought it would be awesome if TX supports WPF to have Flash like dynamic UIs to suppliment TX UIs.
TX GUI is bitmap based and static whereas WPF is both supports bitmap and vector graphics, dynamic in nature just like Flash.
Best of all, WPF also has nice Expression Blend, also like Flash editor, to make dynamic UIs in a snap by designer..
I'm not sure what GG has in mind but lack of GUI editor in TX is bit of a disappointment.
TX is built on top of .Net already, so supporting WPF would be not so difficult.
Perhaps it's possible to replace TX UI Toolkit since it's more flexible, powerful, and has many plugins to create custom widgets.
-Chris
#2
03/03/2008 (11:21 am)
Might be interesting for Windows games, but the limited .net subset that works with XNA on the 360 would probably be an issue. Of course, I've also read about horrible artifacting when combining the two since they were not meant to work together.
#3
03/03/2008 (11:29 pm)
I'm sure you heard XNA will be ported to Zune (I thought it was bit crazy) and I think it's a matter of time to have WPF support(or subset of WPF, Silverlight?) in 360.
Anyway, I believe majority of the user is Windows based and we can make it as plugin, can't we?
Waiting for TX to become production ready takes forever and I was little bit tire of waiting for updates.
We need better editor suport. I know GG is working on integrating the editor for all of its product but who knows how long it will take?
It's pretty sad that TX doesn't even have an editor of its own, let alone the GUI editor.

I think at this point, it's probably better/easier writting a WPF based game with TX plugin rather than the otherway around.
WPF is pretty amazing in my opinion. It just lacks a good 3d framework.

-Chris
#4
03/05/2008 (8:39 am)
WPF is nice, it just wasn't designed with XNA in mind--and vice-versa. It would be an interesting addition, and who knows how much of the tech will cross-over between products or tech there will be.
#5
04/16/2008 (7:43 am)
I have a great news for those who are waiting for WPF support on D3D apps.
".NET 3.5 Service Release" will include DXInterop.
Watch the video toward the end, http://silverlight.net/learn/learnvideo.aspx?video=43794
They show little demo of mixing WPF and D3D. They also mentioned WPF on XNA is a posiblity.
Even if XNA doesn't support WPF out-of-the-box, adding one will be nobrainer with DXInterop.
I'm pretty excited about this. It solves my dynamic UI problems once and for all.
It's also a nice for many TX users since TX doesn't have GUI editor yet.
^^
-Chris