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by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/21/2012 3:51:00 AM
As I briefly mentioned earlier I am endeavoring on a project which is going to demand a lot from me physically, but also from a technical perspective. I have a lot of things on my plate, during daytime I'm 100% engaged with work at clients, nighttime is the time I have to squeeze in a lot of activities into. For one, I have two kids that needs my attention - and I have a golden rule of engaging with them from the time I get back from work till they're in bed. This leaves some 2-4 hours ...
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by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 10/23/2011 12:18:59 PM
In 2007 I started something called Balder, a 3D engine for the Web using Silverlight. Back then with Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and later 2.0, there really weren't that many options to make it especially feature rich, nor fast. My first goal when I started this whole thing was basically to achieve 3D rendering on the Web across multiple platforms (Windows + Mac, later Moonlight on Linux) and have a declarative programming model for 3D. This is still the motivation for Balder; to be cross-platform on ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 4/13/2011 2:27:00 PM
As most of you probably already know, Balder has thus far for Silverlight been a software rendered 3D engine. Basically what that means is that the CPU has been doing all the rendering, and not only that but also within the .net runtime. To say the least, quite costly - at least if one wants a bit of accuracy as well.Now that the cat is out of the box and Silverlight 5 beta is available I can finally announce the new hardware accelerated support for Balder. The full feature list can be found her ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 2/19/2011 3:11:01 AM
Balder is getting closer to a cross platform engine and now there is a crude implementation of WPF as well. It uses XNA for the actual rendering and you can use XAML within WPF on the desktop. Also worth mentioning is that you can use XNA directly on Windows without WPF as well inside Windows Forms.For now there is no binary release, but pulling the source and compiling the Balder_Wpf.sln solution in the solutions folder you'll get the binaries needed.Summarizing the platforms supported fully or ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/11/2011 3:51:14 PM
Balder is a very ambitious project - or at least with all the ideas I have in my head for the project, it is very ambitious. In order to fulfill its ambitiousness (is that a word?), we're looking at getting contributions to the projects. There are multiple ways one can contribute, you could fork the project at Codeplex and commit to your own repository and request pulls from your fork. You could work on your own local repository, do changes and create bundles with changesets that you can post on ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/10/2011 4:26:16 PM
Some of you might be wondering what is on the Agenda for Balder in 2011. One of the core focus areas is to get the library to a level were it is easier to get people onboard and have more resources contribute to the project. In order to do that, some things has to be streamlined a little bit better, this is typically documentation, but also get things like a proper build server up and running and get continuous integration working.Documentation- Architectural documentation of the entire library- ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/1/2011 6:22:52 AM
Happy new year to everyone!I'm starting off 2011 with brilliant news. For the most part, in fact 99.9% of Balder, I have been the sole developer. I've had some help with some of the math from friends and contributors, and some contributions has come along the way in the form of emailed source files or patches - and I'm truly thankful for all of this!In the middle of December 2010 I started a dialog with Rui Silvestre who has been using Balder for their company YDreams, and he agreed to join the ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 11/1/2010 3:53:02 PM
The last couple of days in the aftermath of PDC 2010 has been quite stressful. Mary Jo Foleys posted an interview with Bob Muglia about Microsoft shifting in their strategy for Silverlight. With the post series by Scott Barnes as a backdrop, it sure looked pale for Silverlight - on the outside.It wasn't so much the article itself from Mary that screamed death - but all the interpretations of the content. Sure, it was easy to read into it that this could mean that Microsoft was in fact dropping S ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 10/1/2010 3:14:08 AM
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a competition for creating a Windows Phone 7 app. Yesterday it was announced that I was one of 3 lucky winners of the competition, the two other winners being Sigurd Snorteland and Ronny Gydar. The grand prize; a Windows Phone 7 device.The results were announced at the Windows Phone Developer Community meetup yesterday. Thanks a lot to the jury for picking my app as one of the winners, and to the sponsor of the hardware for providing the phones - that will ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 9/18/2010 5:14:44 PM
One of the more common feature request of Balder has been to be able to load files from anywhere. Although it is a commonly requested feature, there are a whole set of other features that is constantly getting more priority than this. Until tonight. I had 30 minutes to spare and was able to get it done, at least so anyone can start extending on this themselves.Balder is using something its calling a FileLoader, defined through the interface IFileLoader. Till tonight, there could only be one File ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 9/18/2010 1:48:45 PM
I've been reading a book on a subject that is halfway interesting to me; at least the Silverlight part of it. :) Its written by Gastón C. Hillar, you'll find it here.The book is not a beginners guide to Silverlight or SharePoint, you are required to have some background with both technologies to be able to get full joy from the book. Even though, SharePoint is not something I normally do or find that exciting, I must admit that after reading it, Gastón has triggered me a little bit. I like the w ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 8/31/2010 10:17:44 AM
Not everyone has the luxury of jumping on new technologies, it can be historical reasons, don't have time to learn, deployment reasons - or flat out you simply don't like anything new :) .Anyways, I was doing a codereview on a project last week, which was written in Windows Forms. The developers had some pain, Windows Forms being one of them - and a constant feeling that they were barking up the wrong tree when using Windows Forms. Its been a couple of years since my last Windows Forms project, ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 8/19/2010 3:46:39 AM
Yesterday I released a new version of the Sample Browser for Balder - but some of the samples just didn't work on Safari or Chrome on OSX, but worked in FireFox and Opera and all browsers on Windows (including Safari and Chrome). Turns out there is an accuracy issue with using the System.Math.Log() method. It produces different results on OSX in Safari and Chrome when the code is compiled in release mode. When compiled in debug, it produces the correct result. The method in Balder in question: B ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 8/15/2010 7:20:49 AM
Hopefully I'm not forgetting anything (probably am) - but below is a clarification of what features Balder has.Coordinate system Balder uses a left-handed coordinate system - currently there is no way to change this, but there are plans for opening up for any coordinate system. Nodes Interaction - one can enable interaction on any nodes and they can be interactively manipulated during runtime Position coordinates Rotation coordinates, in angles for each axis Scale coordinates Hierarchical rende ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 8/10/2010 5:08:21 PM
Things are moving fast these days with Balder and I am closing in on the next release already. Keeping up with my target pace.At this point these are the things already done or is in progress for the next release:New Skybox, utilizing built in Silverlight perspective projection, which can be hardware acceleratedPerspective correct texture mapping - previous version had only affine texture mappingBilinear filtering for texture mappingPerformance boost for the entire rendering pipelineBetter, fast ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 8/1/2010 4:45:34 AM
Balder has been throughout the development had the focus of extensibility, everything should be extensible. In Balder one has a set of object types, both 2D and 3D. For loading 3D models one has something called Mesh. This will automatically pick the right AssetLoader for the filetype based upon the file extension and parse the file and generate a 3D Mesh for Balder to render. Some of the other objects, which are considered primitives such as Box, Cylinder and Ring - are generated on the fly.Thi ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 7/29/2010 10:00:02 AM
A lot of effort has been put into the Balder project, and with the recent work on moving Balder onto multiple platforms and not only Silverlight. I've decided its time to change the license a bit.For anyone using Balder today with Silverlight on the Web/Desktop, there are no changes - with the exception of one thing. If you're developing a commercial library or package that can be conceived as a competitor to Balder - then you need a commercial license. Other than that, no changes. The intention ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 7/15/2010 5:31:08 AM
The last few days I've been busy porting Balder to other platforms, amongst those; Windows Phone 7 Series. There are some nuances between the different platforms Balder will support, one of these for Windows Phone 7 was that the Load() method does not exist on an AssemblyPart from the deployment object.Balder has a discover architecture were it discovers different types from the loaded assemblies, in the Silverlight version I could simply go and get all the AssemblyParts and get it as a resource ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 2/24/2010 2:30:00 PM
Its been a little more than 24 hours since I started playing with the EQATEC profiler and have identified bottlenecks in Balder that is close to impossible to discover without a profiler. One of things I really liked about the EQATEC profiler was its really easy to use user interface, its super-intuitive and I got up and running in seconds and could drill down straight to the bottlenecks just as fast. What impresses me with the profiler is the speed of it, I've worked with quite a ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 2/8/2010 9:23:00 AM
UPDATE 8th of July 2010 : 0.8.8.7 is out - read more here.Finally after a couple of months of hard work and polishing the code, API and performance, version 0.8.8.6 ofBalderis out. A SampleBrowser can be found here for viewing most of the features ofBalder. The features that has changed or is new are as follows: * Introduced Silverlight in Core, but still maintaining platform independence - Using core objects directly in Xaml can now be done * Removed all controls in Balder.Core.Silverlight.Cont ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/27/2010 3:00:00 AM
Its been crazy weeks since I decided to pull 0.8.8.5, but it was for the better. The result is that the rendering speed and quality has gone up quite dramatically. The next version of Balder will be 0.8.8.6 and will contain at least the following: - Optimized framebuffer management- Optimized drawing/rendering- Optimized lighting- Proper polygon clipping against the viewport - Completely refactored way of handling objects, no duplication in the type hierarchy for Balder, like in 0.8.8. ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/16/2010 2:25:00 AM
One of the things I really love in Silverlight is the promotion of non-locking UIs through heavy use of asynchronous operations for things like webservice calls. The main problem though with this is that it is running on a different thread than the UI thread and you can't modify anything on the UI without running on the same thread. This even goes for databinding, so if you have properties on an object databound in the UI and you set the value on any of these properties, you still need to b ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 1/10/2010 7:27:00 AM
Recently I've been working on a small Silverlight project at a client and at the same time I've been working on implementing a SampleBrowser for Balder on my spare time, both these applications are using the MVVM paradigm and all that comes with it. One of the things that has really been bugging me is the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, a key interface for making the View observe changes on objects. Not only do you have to implement the same thing over and over again (the notification ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 12/17/2009 5:06:00 PM
A couple of days ago I published a new version of Balder; 0.8.8.5. It had a bunch of improvements in it, especially when it comes to the Silverlight Control support. I had to pull the release mere hours after its release. The reason for pulling it was that I did a lot of optimizations in the rendering, or at least I thought I did. Turns out that when running on a very fast Dual core or Quad core computer, it was faster - but on slower machines, it turned out to be quite slow. Instead of rev ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 12/13/2009 12:49:00 PM
On the 9th of February, Software 2010 is kicked off. Petri Wilhelmsen and myself will be holding an hour on game development with managed code using Microsoft Xna and Silverlight (featuring Balder). We will be focusing on 3D development and cross-platform using .net.Really looking forward to doing a co-op with Petri. For more details and signup, go here. ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 12/6/2009 5:28:00 PM
2010 is going to be a busy year for me, along side consultancy for several customers, I've been scheduled to do a few courses. Silverlight is the topic for all but one of the courses.You'll find all the courses in this overview of all of Bouvets courses here.Even though, listed as Silverlight 3 specific, they will be focusing on Silverlight in general and will include some of Silverlight 4 as well. We're looking into putting up a Silverlight 4 specific course as well. So, i ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 11/18/2009 4:30:00 AM
One of the coolest new things with Silverlight 4 is the ability to use C# 4 and in particular the dynamic keyword and infrastructure that comes along with it. The dynamic keyword allows for dynamic typing in .net, which is great for a number of reasons, but alongside it there is something called DynamicObject that makes this a whole lot more interesting for development in environments such as Silverlight.The DynamicObject is a class one can derive from and override a number of methods, such as T ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 11/18/2009 3:14:00 AM
Today Scott Guthrie announced the beta release of Silverlight 4, the release rate for Silverlight is amazing. Its only been 4 months since we got the release of Silverlight 3 and now everyone is getting their hands on with the beta of version 4, amazing stuff - kudos to the Silverlight development team. I've been working with SL4 for a while now through early access from Microsoft, and I must say that I'm really impressed with what they have accomplished and the quality of the builds has ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 7/27/2009 4:52:00 AM
Working with Balder really gets me nostalgic. Nowadays, working with graphics programming one would choose OpenGL, DirectX or Xna to get real performant. Back in the days (mid 1990s), we didn't have the luxury of high-speed CPUs and dedicated 3D accelerated graphics adapters. Everything had to be done by the CPU. Balder has turned out to be just that kind of project, everything is done by the CLR and then the CPU.Balder is now closing in on the beta stage, which means that we're getting ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 7/14/2009 4:07:00 PM
Balder has been updated to support Silverlight 3 the release version. The previous samples posted here now works with the release version. You can find the samples directly here and here. And I've also created a version that just shows off that the texturemapping is very real, it can be found here. :) We're working on new demos to truely show off Balder - its feature richness and capabilities are way beyond a rotating teapot. But focus on getting everything right in the engine has ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 7/14/2009 3:27:00 PM
I guess most of you already know that Silverlight 3 is out. Exciting times. Version is truely a remarkable release in the history so far of Silverlight. With it there are some changes in the API for you who have been working the the beta releases of Silverlight 3. The most noticable for me was the WriteableBitmap class. The WriteableBitmap can be used if you want to draw things yourself onto a surface that can be rendered by Silverlight. The first change lies with the constructor, previously ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 7/11/2009 3:42:00 AM
Earlier I posted about some extensions I did for Silverlight handling INotifyPropertyChanged and helpers for DependencyProperties. Recently I've had a couple of request to release a downloadable source with samples of their use. Since the original posts (found here and here), I've refined them a little bit and worked out some quirks that was left in the originals. So, why should one use these kind of extensions and what do they solve? INotifyPropertyChanged and creating DependencyPr ...
by einar@dolittle.com (Einar Ingebrigtsen) via Einar Ingebrigtsen on 6/20/2009 4:31:00 AM
We've just added Silverlight 3 support for Balder and at the moment we have support for both Silverlight 2 and 3. As developers we'd love to just have support for one version, but we've opened up a poll for people to cast there vote if support for Silverlight 2 is critical. Please go here and cast your vote and also please leave a note as to why this is critical for you. ...
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