If you're an XNA developer, and you'd like to port your XNA game to iPhone, Android or Silverlight (web), then this might be of particular interest to you. I've written an implementation of XNA that runs on Silverlight and the iPhone. And it actually works - I've already released a game using it. I've named the library "ExEn".
And now I am crowd-sourcing funding to release it as open-source and do an Android port.
If this is something that you would find useful, I'd really appreciate it if you could help me by funding the project and by telling all your friends about it.
Here is the ExEn project page on RocketHub - go take a look!
If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them here, at RocketHub, or via email.
Thank you,
Andrew Russell
XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight
(How) do you handle custom shaders/Effects? Did you just implement the basic effects in GLSL (for iphone and android), or is this for 2D sprites only?
Author
At the moment graphics is SpriteBatch only, with no custom shaders. This is similar to the Zune. It's also worth pointing out that XNA on WP7 doesn't support custom shaders either.
On the iPhone custom shaders would require using OpenGL ES 2 (so not compatible with older iPhone generations). I use OpenGL ES 1 to remain compatible with all models. It's a fixed-function pipeline, no shaders.
But I'd be happy to make GLSL shaders work, if someone or the community were to make and fund such a feature request.
On Silverlight 3 custom shaders must run in software and therefore have serious performance implications. But it is theoretically possible. I'm interested to see what Silverlight 5 will support - it will apparently do hardware 3D, but I haven't heard if it will do hardware shaders or not.
One of my core goals is compatibility between all platforms, which is why SpriteBatch is the baseline. 3D doesn't work everywhere (yet). However for a 3D game that runs only on iPhone/Android, it would be possible - probably even easy - to use straight up OpenGL for rendering, and letting ExEn handle everything else.
On a related note - one unique thing that ExEn on Silverlight supports is hardware additive blending. I am not aware of any other Silverlight libraries that do this. You can get some pretty neat effects using this.
On the iPhone custom shaders would require using OpenGL ES 2 (so not compatible with older iPhone generations). I use OpenGL ES 1 to remain compatible with all models. It's a fixed-function pipeline, no shaders.
But I'd be happy to make GLSL shaders work, if someone or the community were to make and fund such a feature request.
On Silverlight 3 custom shaders must run in software and therefore have serious performance implications. But it is theoretically possible. I'm interested to see what Silverlight 5 will support - it will apparently do hardware 3D, but I haven't heard if it will do hardware shaders or not.
One of my core goals is compatibility between all platforms, which is why SpriteBatch is the baseline. 3D doesn't work everywhere (yet). However for a 3D game that runs only on iPhone/Android, it would be possible - probably even easy - to use straight up OpenGL for rendering, and letting ExEn handle everything else.
On a related note - one unique thing that ExEn on Silverlight supports is hardware additive blending. I am not aware of any other Silverlight libraries that do this. You can get some pretty neat effects using this.
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