Microsoft Open Source Popfly Game Engine Available

While it looks like the recently decommissioned Microsoft Popfly project won’t be able to come back to life from its own ashes, a small part did manage to survive the official shutdown date on August 24th 2009. The Popfly Game Engine is currently available for download via Microsoft’s open-source project repository, CodePlex. In fact, the code has been released under an open-source license and allows melancholic Popfly users to access a small “remember me by.” However, by releasing the source code for the Popfly Game Creator on CodePlex, Microsoft is addressing a much more different audience than the website.

In this regard, while Popfly was designed to be embraced by all users, irrespective of their coding abilities, the same is not valid for Popfly Game Creator. While RIAs, mashups, websites and games could be built via Popfly by non-programmers, the game creator will require coding skills beyond those of novice developers.

“We were able to put together something for you – the Popfly Game Engine. Now this is just the game engine – the part that plays the game data files. It doesn’t include the creator (although it does contain enough reference information on the data files that someone could create a new one), nor any server-side support code – I took out the portions of the code that communicated with popfly.com for high scores, badges and the like,” explained Ben Anderson, Microsoft software design engineer.

Fact is that, for the Popfly users who grabbed their gaming content from the website before it was shut down, the Popfly Game Engine will allow them to access the data files from their creations. Popfly was discontinued completely at the start of this week, and Microsoft has confronted with a range of requests to open source the project. However, the Popfly Game Creator is an exception, don’t expect the rest of the project to go open source because this won’t be the case. The company explained that the main reason for this was the fact that Popfly was too deeply integrated with internal Microsoft web services, bundled code from additional projects, had strong intellectual property barriers and could only really function in a Microsoft data center.

“I do think it’s an interesting bit of code showing how to create a simple game engine in C# on Silverlight. This should also provide an avenue for those of you who would like to take the leap from the world of the GUI game builder, look under the covers to see how things work and actually get your hands dirty with some real code,” Anderson added.