Chris Cavanagh's Silverlight Physics Simulator

Chris Cavanagh, physics modeler extraordinaire, has created a Silverlight based physics modeler. This is a fun sample to play with but I noticed in his blog post that he's using the HtmlTimer. This class is a wrapper on the javascript setInterval method and as such has a relatively low priority for calling back to the user. This is why the class is marked obsolete. The best way to build a high priority timer in the Silverlight v1.1 alpha is to use a XAML animation and hook it’s completed event. The Lumines video player I wrote uses this. I’ve let Chris know about this trick and hopefully he’ll incorporate this. I have a feeling this is the cause of the stuttering he’s seeing. In v1.1 we will be adding a proper timer class to replace the HtmlTimer.

Click the image below to run the sample. More info and a promise of source code can be found in Chris’ blog post.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2007
  PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/archive/2007/05/24/chris-cavanagh-s-silverlight-physics-simulator.aspx

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2007
  I've changed the demo to use a Storyboard (much nicer) and the source code is now available! http://chriscavanagh.wordpress.com/2007/05/24/silverlight-2d-physics-source-code/

• Anonymous
  May 24, 2007
  This simulater started me thinking about arcade games (the simulater looks a lot like an arcade game). Silverlight may be used to port 2D arcade games from XBox.

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2007
  Silverlight news - May 27,2007

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2008
  Silverlight 2 has a Timer (DispatcherTimer)