It has been a busy week for the Mono team. Yesterday a new version of MonoDevelop landed with C# 4 support, and on Tuesday news of the Novell sale to Attachmate brought up questions over the project’s future. Today, Miguel de Icaza – the Mono team lead – posted some videos of hardware acceleration and 3D perspective support in Moonlight.
Moonlight is the Mono project’s open-source implementation of the Silverlight runtime. It can take Silverlight 3 applications designed for web browsers or the desktop and make them available to users on platforms not usually supported such as Linux.
David Reveman, a developer who also works on the Compiz project (an open-source desktop effects application for Linux platforms) has added the new hardware acceleration and 3D perspective components to Moonlight. Hardware acceleration enables faster frame rates when rendering transforms in Silverlight, and also includes realtime effect rendering such as blurring. 3D perspective support enables hardware-powered animation and rendering of 2D objects in 3D space, with anything from photos and movies to actual working Silverlight controls being positionable in 3D.
Miguel has posted two YouTube videos showing the effects of these two enhancements for Moonlight (hardware acceleration, 3D perspective), along with a writeup on his blog. The code is already in the Moonlight Github repository and available in the nightly builds.
Comments