A New Pipeline For Windows Phone

The Windows Phone port is one of our most painful ports, the platforms is so fragmented, volatile and rigid its remarkably hard to extract a common porting layer that will satisfy our requirements. We've just updated our servers with the 3rd port we did for Windows Phone, its experimental so its off by default, to activate it just use win.newPipeline=true in your build arguments.

As you may recall our first port targeted Windows Phone 7.5 and used XNA which Microsoft killed with Windows Phone 8.
Our second port was silverlight based and tried to dynamically create a scene-graph structure to match the graphics we are drawing in code, this is a very "imaginative" approach and it worked for most cases but had a lot of issues worst of which was very bad graphics performance and paint artifacts that were very hard to fix.

read more...