Best platform for online games [closed]

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I'm going to create an online game service. Player will play with other players, so only human with human games. Games will be various, from pocker to checkers. Only turn-based ones, no FPSes, RTSes, etc. But games can be really dynamic, like one turn per second.

So,

• No complex server-side logic, just validating moves, writing logs, calculating player's rating, but no AI.
• Multichannel text chat. Push logic is highly preferred over poll.
• UI requires no 3D graphics with fog, shaders and so on.
• UI is highly interactive, with help tips, element highlighting, keyboard shortcuts.
• It should be easy to add new game type. So pluggable UI parts are really welcome.
• If it will not become a nightmare, I prefer to support MacOS an Linux.

So I'm desiding between Silverlight and ASP.Net+AJAX. ASP.Net+AJAX seems to be much more portable (at least nothing to install), but harder to get things done. Silverlight seen to be more friendly development environment, but I'll have to be aware of Moonlight, so I cannot use any hot new Silverlight features.

Also, I'm exper开发者_高级运维ienced in server side .Net (network protocols over raw sockets, WCF, multithreading, MSSQL) and client side WinForms, but not in JavaScript or Silverlight, thus I'll have to learn something new anyway.

The question is - what approach/technology fits my needs best? Of cource, I'm open to suggestions of other options, I did not mention, if any.

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With ASP.NET / MVC 3 and HTML 5 (with modernizer) will allow you to support pretty much everyone, depending on how you handle non-HTML 5 clients. You can do some amazing things there.

If you are looking for the fast way to code it, Silverlight is great from a development and maintainability point of view, and you get to leverage the same codebase with Windows Phone 7 which is pretty cool, and hopefully Microsoft will add more clients.

As another note, no matter which way you choose, you can also host your app with Azure, which is a pretty cool way to get small applications up and running without having to deal with all the hosting issues.

Disclaimer, I am a Program Manager on the Silverlight team

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If it's fast like one turn per second, in my opinion it's better Silverlight, because it's faster with less effort.

On the other side, I would avoid to use it, because of the low userbase

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Silverlight is great, but if you don't want your users turned off by a (in my opinion small) install, AND you want high portability, I think you've already answered your own questions : asp.net/ajax

It has everything you are looking for and there are lots of frameworks out there that can ease the burden of UI development in asp.net/ajax.