Microsoft Opens Popfly Source Code

by Lisa Hoover - Aug. 27, 2009Comments (8)

Microsoft Popfly - No More

Popfly, a platform developed by Microsoft to help people create and share games with their friends, was shut down this week, according to a blog post on the project's Web site. It's not a total loss to the gaming community, however, since Microsoft decided to open source the code and host it on CodePlex for anyone who still wants to tinker with the game engine.

Popfly team member John Montgomery writes, "Unfortunately, on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. At that time, your access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued. However, Microsoft is still very much dedicated to helping you express your creativity and pursuing a path to software development and offers multiple products to help along the way."

Although the project has been officially shut down, Popfly developers say there are a number of different directions to go with the code:

* Example code for a simple, general purpose Silverlight game engine
* Create a Silverlight 3 scene / actor / behavior editor for the data format and make new games
* Porting the engine to run your games on other platforms, like XBox 360 or Zune via XNA Game Studio or client PC via WPF
* Building a copy of the game engine to use with your game data to post on your website.
* Fix multi-actor collision resolution and make Lots O' Peas go faster!
* Add new features like grid-based terrain, dialog trees, etc

What do you think? Is Popfly worth saving, or is it time to retire this project?


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8 Comments
 

Well, DotNetNuke evolved from a trashed microsoft product. No telling what the development community might do with this.


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Jack - not quite true. DotNetNuke evolved from a starter kit project demonstrating a CMS in ASP.NET that people could base their projects on. It was half baked, but it was just a starter kit / demonstration project But yes, the development community might take this project and evolve it into a great product/engine.


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What's PopFly?


Just sayin'.


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I'm still trying to figure out what PopFly is/does/ or was intended to do.


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Given that i am still confused what popfly is.... yes, to trash it goes


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@Akshara: Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't have merit. Sheesh.


Popfly is/was a pretty sweet visual game creator (I'm purposely ignoring the "mash-up" aspect, which I didn't find very interesting). Visual programming has been done many times before, but Popfly did a pretty fantastic job with many aspects of the process. There are doubtlessly countless gems in the source base, and frankly I'd also just like it to be kept alive as is. My 9 year old son was able to build some pretty cool games. I'm a big fan of bringing software development to youngsters.


Kudos Microsoft!


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Perhaps Microsoft will watch what happens to PopFly and learn something about Open Source and other projects. They've just barely stuck their pinky toe into the water with the Linux GPL drivers for their Server software.


Their ambivalent support or laissiez-faire attitude for Moonlight a case in point. Why should anyone want to write for Moonlight if its only 10 to 15% of the market? If Microsoft isn't going to come out in full support for Moonlight, Silverlight is most certainly nothing more than a "IE browser add-on" and not a universal standard.


In many ways they are a dinosaur mired in the tar pit. They have hooked their business model and all of their product line to shrink-wrap and restrictive proprietary licensed operating system software that's pulling them under. Until they fully commit to a service organization and insist on "Windows now and forever" they will stay caught in the tar pit.


The issue has always been: "what can you do with it?" not "I've got the latest Windows software, cool". Its the service and the utility that makes the product, not the bits and bytes on a disk.


Windows would be a much better OS if the marketing people would be fired and Microsoft didn't worry about next quarter's stock dividend. If they focused on making Windows better and released updates to both their kernel and the surrounding infrastructure and not so much on the next great OS software release XP > Vista > Win7 etc. A continuum would be more easily handled by their company, the public and the business community, their biggest customer.


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I missed a negative:


Until they fully commit to a service organization and no longer insist on "Windows now and forever" they will stay caught in the tar pit.


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