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

heaps.io

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

#51

Post by bstar77 »

chii wrote: post #25
cpeterso wrote: post #13

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.

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.

I've done non-trivial projects in Phaser and Godot... I thought I would never prefer an editor oriented engine (after trying Unity), but I've done a complete 180* on that. Managing game objects and their inheritance tree in the editor makes life so much easier and less bug prone and attaching the scripts makes accessing relevant code much easier. Also, every feature in the editor UI seems to have a code counterpart.

Maybe it's just that Godot is incredibly good at what it does (for 2d game dev), but regardless, it's been a joy to use where Phaser was a drag. I don't personally have any use cases where I would go back to Phaser or any JS Engines like it.

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

#52

Post by bstar77 »

redundantly wrote: post #17
cpeterso wrote: post #13

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.

Godot, hands down. It's incredible and is close to releasing version 4.0 which has massive 3d improvements, if that's your thing. Documentation is 1st rate and the community is the best I've seen for game dev.

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

#53

Post by syntheweave »

redundantly wrote: post #17
cpeterso wrote: post #13

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.

I've used both Godot and Haxe(outside of Heaps, but there are several Haxe game engines and frameworks).

Godot is better for just shipping small game projects; everything's in one place with an IDE that you can extend, and the design limits imposed by Godot are mostly a matter of how detailed a scene you can support. Those limits are not a barrier most indie devs are really facing - you can sink millions of dollars into a game without really needing special engine code, and because it's all open source, adding a patch for the things that do need some customization is not unfeasible. The barriers are much more likely to be in finding good tutorials, documentation, etc which Godot has accumulated plenty of, albeit not as many as Unity.

Justifications for using Haxe come from a systems development viewpoint. It piggybacks on your other technology to add a layer of portability and options for repurposing code; e.g. if you want to debug and test with interpreted code but then compile it for performance, Haxe gives you several means of doing that. Easy things tend to be slightly harder just due to the nature of its cross-platform functionality, but very hard things also become possible for the same reason. Haxe the language is very good, especially considering what it's aiming to do, but it helps to have some familiarity with the technology you are targeting through Haxe first, since things like standard library functions will follow what their host environment does, which means it is not really a "write once compile everywhere" kind of deal. But if you're really set on exploring engine tech from the beginning, Haxe is a useful way to build up portability, since you can slip its output into a codebase gradually. And engines that build on Haxe are generally coming from the mindset of solving those deep technical issues, which means they often have a great pedigree but aren't the easiest to get started with(since they assume you know what you're doing and what you want out of the tech).

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

#54

Post by jan_Inkepa »

throwaway82652 wrote: post #31
nine_k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

What is missing in HTML5? You have WASM and websockets and the WebGL canvas built into every browser now, that seems to replicate just about everything Flash was known for doing? And just to clarify, I mean actually using the same old Flash development tools (apparently it's called Adobe Animate now?) Or is the issue that the export-to-HTML5 functionality in those tools is just not fully done yet?

>What is missing in HTML5?

- Audio (while in some respect capable) is a nightmare, the interface is unstable and breaks about once a year in my experience.

- You can't do pixel-perfect rendering (People keep promising that you can - the last time I checked was a few months ago - the DOM rendering architecture is deeply wretched when it comes to pixel-access).

- No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art into games like there was in flash. (SVG exists, and I've used it in games myself, but it's a niche thing to do). For most engines nowadays you're baking your SVG art to sprite, but flash kinda took care of it for you - its approach to vector art+animation was great/very very powerful, and Adobe Animate allows for HTML5 animation export nowadays, but that's somewhat short of a full interactive app pipeline.

- many of the html runtimes for new engines (Unity for instance) feel waay heavier/more sluggish in the browser than flash games. Pauses during loading/weird interactions with the mouse, having to click before you can see anything is common behaviour. And often they don't perform so well as the flash runtime.

- easy to make fancy + good-looking interactive UIs. There's a reason Scaleform was so beloved for UIs even outside of the browser ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx ).

It's not obviously better than flash still. Flash was a very stable platform for many many years - really good with backwards compatibility (IIRC as a result of literally having secretly several copies of the runtime for different versions), and ...well, for instance Godot HTML5 builds as of last week crashes in safari for everyone it seems.

Source: I made bunch of flash games, and have made a bunch of HTML5 games, and have made a HTML5 game engine myself. And flash was just a better experience as a user for so many things (except for abuses) and as a developer. Outside of writing javascript yourself, haxe is probably the best replacement for flash (as well as being good in its own right). I have been playing with heaps this week actually and it's yeah pretty nice. But flash had a nicer pipeline.

Flash was weaker at 3d stuff, though - even back when flash was a thing I still went for Unity/hand-rolled for 3d games.

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

#55

Post by klodolph »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #54
throwaway82652 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is missing in HTML5? You have WASM and websockets and the WebGL canvas built into every browser now, that seems to replicate just about everything Flash was known for doing? And just to clarify, I mean actually using the same old Flash development tools (apparently it's called Adobe Animate now?) Or is the issue that the export-to-HTML5 functionality in those tools is just not fully done yet?

>What is missing in HTML5? - Audio (while in some respect capable) is a nightmare, the interface is unstable and breaks about once a year in my experience. - You can't do pixel-perfect rendering (People keep promising that you can - the last time I checked was a few months ago - the DOM rendering architecture is deeply wretched when it comes to pixel-access). - No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art i…

Just my experience—the audio API seems relatively stable to me since the autoplay policies launched a couple years ago. I do remember it being a mess back when I started doing audio, and I remember needing libraries to paper over the differences between different browsers, but these days I don’t need that.

Agreed that the “export to browser” in Unity et al. is usually junk.

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

#56

Post by MattRix »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #54
throwaway82652 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is missing in HTML5? You have WASM and websockets and the WebGL canvas built into every browser now, that seems to replicate just about everything Flash was known for doing? And just to clarify, I mean actually using the same old Flash development tools (apparently it's called Adobe Animate now?) Or is the issue that the export-to-HTML5 functionality in those tools is just not fully done yet?

>What is missing in HTML5? - Audio (while in some respect capable) is a nightmare, the interface is unstable and breaks about once a year in my experience. - You can't do pixel-perfect rendering (People keep promising that you can - the last time I checked was a few months ago - the DOM rendering architecture is deeply wretched when it comes to pixel-access). - No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art i…

Can confirm all this. I used to work professionally as a Flash developer from 2005 to 2010. Since then I’ve been working using Unity and other game engines, but nothing else really comes close to the workflow of Flash. Sometimes it feels like tools in this area are moving backwards.

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

#57

Post by munificent »

klodolph wrote: post #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 e…

> as opposed to people who get excited about engines, architectural patterns, and programming languages.

I feel attacked.

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

#58

Post by kovac »

klodolph wrote: post #32
telchior wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm certainly not going to try to write comments assuming that people don't read linked page, that sounds tiring :-) You don't have to click on "About Heaps", the landing page mentions HaXe inside the page

Or click on the link to the source and see for yourself.

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

#60

Post by jupp0r »

munificent wrote: post #57
klodolph wrote: post #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 e…

> as opposed to people who get excited about engines, architectural patterns, and programming languages. I feel attacked.

Well the people who used to be excited about Flash certainly were not excited about any of the things mentioned above.
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