what happened to just using Vulcan
Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#22The idea of world generation being this easy in a game engine is cool. I can't wait to play around with it! Thanks for sharing this.
https://heaps.io/samples/world.html
Edit: spelling
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#23what happened to just using Vulcan
If you mean Vulkan, there are a lot of platforms where it's not available.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#24What 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.
I've half-learned both. My impression is that Godot is more like a framework (but more so) with prescribed ways of doing things, with lots of custom languages and formats, and Heaps is more like a library you use in a codebase that belongs to you a bit more.
From an ability-to-ship-games perspective, starting out, I'd go with Godot. Putting together a game's architecture from scratch with a library like Heaps sounds like a fun project, but to just get a game out the door without fussing around, Godot makes things easier without major downsides. Godot has so many custom things because those things work.
That said, I'm just a dabbler, so I'm sure other people will chime in as well. I'm also sure that if you invest time in learning Godot or Heaps, it will pay off well, because they are both mature projects that people have used to ship commercial games.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#25What 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.
Heaps is a programming focused game engine (or more correctly, a library for game rendering and other various utilities associated with game, like sound, loading models etc etc).
Godot and unity are more of an editor oriented "engine", and you code some small pieces of logic associated with entities in the editor.
They target different audiences, and have different use cases imho.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#26You 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 don't understand why the Flash runtime is needed or why it matters that it went through a "demise". I was under the impression that you could just export Flash to HTML5 and javascript now? I'm not a flash developer so you'll have to forgive me if this is a dumb question.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#27I 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.
> so much potential to be what Typescript has become
the problem really is that typescript was designed to be backwards compatible with javascript - aka, valid js is valid typescript. This is a pretty big constraint.
Haxe could never do this imho. It's got it's own design philosophy. I personally like haxe more, but typescript does have the advantage of the above feature, and a more robust typesystem as a result.
The distinguishing feature of haxe is the macro system - which lets you generate code at compile time. It's almost as powerful as LISP, but in a familiar syntax.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#28What 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.
> how it stacks up against Godot.
Godot is better if you intend to also learn the editor (and potentially the godot language gscript?). You'd probably get something out the door quicker with godot too.
Heaps is a programming framework/library for making games, not a game editor. You'd also need to be pretty familiar with haxe to use it, unlike godot (where you can get away with not learning gscript for simple things).
if you're a beginner game developer, i'd actually start with godot. Once you got one game made with it, you can then explore other options and learn new things.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#29You 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 don't understand why the Flash runtime is needed or why it matters that it went through a "demise". I was under the impression that you could just export Flash to HTML5 and javascript now? I'm not a flash developer so you'll have to forgive me if this is a dumb question.
(1) The rumors about HTML5 are not exactly true.
(2) There are good open-source Flash runtimes.
(3) The selling points of Flash were the no-installation experience and really good development tools. Both aspects are somehow lacking today, so the momentum is gone. Maybe someone will produce a great and accessible tool to create comparable HTML5 experiences, and that thing will become popular. But not yet.
Re: Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine
#30You 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…
Because it's not obvious until visiting the Heaps page and clicking through to About: Heaps is built on Haxe. So you're complimenting it, right? (Your comment reads like a non-sequitur criticism if one doesn't know what Heaps is).
That said, I agree that Haxe seems to attract a good crowd. I've also worked with some very competent people who primarily used HaxeFlixel.