Popfly Team Site

We want to thank everyone who registered for and used Popfly. We’ve been fortunate enough to see all the innovative mashups, Web pages, and games you’ve created since we launched Popfly two years ago and it’s been a pleasure to watch the spirit of creativity flow through a growing Popfly community over the life of the product.

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. If you’re interested in refining your skills in Web applications, please visit Microsoft Web Platform Installer. For those interested in programming on the Xbox, then please visit Microsoft XNA or Microsoft Kodu. And for those who are interested in Windows programming, please visit Microsoft Express. If you have questions or concerns or just want to drop us a line, contact us at popfly@microsoft.com.

Thanks again for your support.

This afternoon, we’re going to deploy something that several folks at Popfly HQ have been hard at work on - a brand new game engine!  This new game engine gives Popfly games vastly-improved performance.  Games should run much, much smoother, and you’ll be able to create games with many more actors and behaviors than ever before.  For an example of these improvements, check out this game:

With the old game engine:

http://www.popfly.com/users/andersbe/Lots%20O%20Peas.content?SL2=false

With the new game engine:

http://www.popfly.com/users/andersbe/Lots%20O%20Peas.content

(NOTE: You’ll only see the improvements after the update goes live, so don’t bother clicking this link until around 4 PM today.)

The improved game engine exploits Silverlight 2 technology, whereas the previous one ran on Silverlight 1.

Compatibility:

We did extensive testing to make sure that existing games would continue to work with the new engine.  However, the performance increases cause a small number of games to behave differently.  When the update goes live this afternoon, you’ll probably want to play your games and see if there are any adjustments you want to make to give your fans an optimal experience.

We look forward to seeing what creative things you’ll do with the power of the new game engine!

As September is winding down, we’ve got some site enhancements that are now live for you:

1. Enhanced News Feeds

Now you can see when people win badges, leave comments on projects, get high scores, and more.

2. The Super Winner Badge

Get this by winning 100 different games.

3. See What's Ripped From What

4. See Your Pending Friend Requests on your Profile Page

Enjoy!

It’s a great time to come back to Popfly and check out all the improvements!  Here are some features we just released as part of the Game Creator Beta:

Features for everyone:

New profile pages, with easier ways to view people’s projects, friends, recent activity, and more
View anyone's favorite projects
Earn badges by creating compelling content, being a good game player, making friends, or just being lucky!  Learn more about badges here.
Lots of performance improvements and bug fixes

Features for game creators of all skill levels:

Undo support for actor appearance editing
Insert images and videos directly into your actor or scene
Play audio from the Web or an uploaded file without custom code
Customize actor edges with a simple drag-and-drop view
Nudge elements into their proper positions with arrow keys
Preview any scene inside the motion dialog and custom code dialog
Jump to any scene when playing a game in the Play editor

Features for advanced game authors:

New properties that can be used at runtime	Actor: Name, TypeName, VisualX, VisualY, VisualWidth, VisualHeight, Scene: Width, Height
Console in the custom code dialog
Scroll wheel & tab support in the XAML & JavaScript editor
"Current Scene" support, for more generic actors and scenes that are easier to clone

Features for game embedders:

Features for mashup authors:

New StringFormatter block
New ImageSlideShow block
Image scraping support in the RSS block