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Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

heaps.io

11–20 of 103 posts

Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

#11
You can remember that there was a vibrant community of Flash game developers before the demise of Flash (EOL December 2020, the date of its “demise” is debatable). There’s not really a replacement for Flash and the community kind of fragmented.

That said, my impression is that a big chunk of talent from the Flash community went to work on HaXe. These are people who make games and want tools to make game development easier—as opposed to people who get excited about engines, architectural patterns, and programming languages. Just as a general impression, based on people I’ve recognized working with HaXe.

Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

#12
post #2

I've written a couple side project games in Heaps and I'm a big fan. If you're familiar with Pixi.js, Heaps and it's language, Haxe, will feel very similar. Haxe is a pretty cool language, it's similar to TypeScript but compiles to native binaries for almost all major game consoles. Heaps was apparently the framework behind Dead Cells if that says anything about the level of polish you can accomplish with this set of…

And all Shiro games: Northgard, Darksburg, upcoming Wartales and Dune games. Not sure about Evoland but I wouldn't be surprised.

Yep, Evoland too! Shiro Games was founded by the creator of Haxe (Nicolas Cannasse). Smart guy.

Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

#17

What are some advantages of Heaps over Godot or Unity? Neither Godot nor Unity are mentioned on Heaps' website, though there are some mentions in Heaps' community forums.

I don't have anything to add, just that I'd really like to know how it stacks up against Godot.

I plan on learning Godot soon, curious if I should choose something else instead.

Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

#18
post #3
post #2

I've written a couple side project games in Heaps and I'm a big fan. If you're familiar with Pixi.js, Heaps and it's language, Haxe, will feel very similar. Haxe is a pretty cool language, it's similar to TypeScript but compiles to native binaries for almost all major game consoles. Heaps was apparently the framework behind Dead Cells if that says anything about the level of polish you can accomplish with this set of…

At first glance it looks pretty nice. I wonder why it hasn't gotten more attention? Or did I just miss it?

Looking through the documentation, it’s a bit lackluster. So I always got the feeling that the primary users of the engine were the engine developers themselves

Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

#19

You can remember that there was a vibrant community of Flash game developers before the demise of Flash (EOL December 2020, the date of its “demise” is debatable). There’s not really a replacement for Flash and the community kind of fragmented. That said, my impression is that a big chunk of talent from the Flash community went to work on HaXe. These are people who make games and want tools to make game development e…

I ported my https://rpgplayground.com from AS3 to Haxe. It was the most sane technology to replace Flash, because it came with some platform independent benefits (as opposed to coding straight in JavaScript)

Not using Heaps but https://github.com/Kode/Kha.

And I think you are indeed correct in your assumption, since I know plenty of others who made that switch.

Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

#20
I really wish Haxe would just take off in the application development world, it had so much potential to be what Typescript has become with the benefit of transpiling to different languages. We theoretically could have had 1 single programming language for a full application with JS front end, Django server, C++ workers, the best of all worlds.
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