Haxe Roundup № 333

by Skial Bainn published on
evoland 2 haxe nicolas cannasse shiro social
Evoland 2 concept art from Shiro Games

Let’s start this week’s roundup off with three more videos from this year’s WWX2015 provided by the Silex Labs team.

I’ve followed Daniel’s announcements about Quaxe from the start, as having HTML and CSS Haxe implementations, especially by a W3C member, are hugely useful to the Haxe community, and it doesn’t rely on regular expressions, which is a bonus.

As for Daniel’s comments, considering he was ill, which usually means your tact has diminished, it wasn’t as bad as I was lead to think. Also Daniel’s comments where the catalyst for a highly opinionated off topic thread a few weeks back.

With Daniel’s 20 plus years of experience, with a lot coming from open source projects, it would be unwise to ignore his advice.

Someone Unknown has started posting YouTube tutorials on OpenFL and Waxe, so here are the latest four I’ve come across.

Siratama has written Using GAFMedia with Haxe in Flash CC[Jp] in which , I think, Siratama has created a Flash CC extension utilising GAFMedia to generate Haxe definitions for your art assets.

Over on the mailing list, Robert Konrad has brought up the idea to create a suite of benchmarks to help out not only the various frameworks improve their performance, but also the standard library. I agree with others in the thread, like Robert and Hugh, who suggest that non framework related tests should be included, so the core compiler targets can be improved, benefiting everyone.

The benchmark suite has been setup by Dmitry Hryppa resulting from the significant performance increase Robert has achieved with Kha, now with 408k bunnies, the fastest framework currently tested, beating LibGDX by 105k bunnies!

Also, OpenFL’s previous surprisingly bad score of 32k bunnies for native has increased to 103k. Now that the source code is available, it can be scrutinised and tested with your results pushed to the benchmark suite.

The Haxor engine was the first accepted pull request adding a test running in the browser via WebGL. Before the pull request got accepted, I was able to achieve 430k bunnies with the reported top score being 525k by Tiago Ling Alexandre.

Matthijs Kamstra has created a website that will teach you about Haxe and NodeJS, with some of the information based on a old haXe website, updated of course and with new, additional content.

Luca Messalira has added further features to haxe-watchify with version 1.3.0, adding a web monitor which is useful on a second monitor or for remote team members by reproducing the command line output in the web page.

Kevin Leung has used UFront, a Haxe framework for writing isomorphic apps, to build What If Z, a website that poses the question “What if you are a zombie survivor?”. It turns out I would be a Kim-Jong-Un styled, kitchen knife wielding, american football gear cladded zombie survivor.

Andy Li is scheduled to present Haxe to JavaScript developers on October the 15th at the London JavaScript Community’s first online meetup.

Even though Ludum Dare 33 has come and gone, the Rat King created Haxe type definitions for Sosowski’s jAllegro, aptly named, Haxe-jAllegro.

An article from Sven Bergström posted over on the snõwkit community site, titled Ludumdate 33, which is actually poorly titled because its packed full new features, samples, releases, performance fixes and community developments, so its not completely Ludum Dare focused.

But that’s not all from Sven, he has also released mínt, a game and tool focused, minimal renderer agnostic UI library for Haxe. Read that again, for Haxe - this is a recurring theme through Sven’s projects, how to improve Haxe, not a single framework.

A quick particle editor has been made for luxe engine using mínt, which you can try out now for yourselves.

A game that can take advantage of all the snõwkit collective additions is Shooter by Jonathan Hirz, created with luxe engine, in which you shoot enemies, destroy the environment and rebuild your terrain.

Ian Harrigan who’s been working on HaxeUI version 2 (which will be renderer agnostic just like mínt, but with far more controls) has launched the HaxeUI FaceBook page and the HaxeUI Patreon page. Recently with Ian’s ongoing improvement of HaxeUI, he has added the Kha backend for HaxeUI.

Rafael Oliveira has created Mobile, a library for Kha that helps calculate a new resolution based on your default resolution, creating the correct aspect ratio for your app.

Lubos Lenco has released Spiral Ride for iOS, made with Kha and ZBlend. You should’ve seen or read about it before I’ve included previews of it in lots of past roundups.

Adi Reddy Mora has published his first Haxe powered PixiJS game to Virgin Games which uses his PixiJS type definitions. Unfortunately the game is tablet only, so you might get a 404 error if you try it.

Mark Knol from MediaMonks Games has created and launched Tricky Titans, which is a turn based local multiplayer game for the Google ChromeCast.

The OpenFL team announced on Twitter that Electronic Arts “uses OpenFL and an in house 3D engine to deliver the latest season of Madden NFL Mobile on iOS and Android”. How awesome is that.

Mike has released his first HaxeFlixel game called Planet Squares Inc, published to itch.io and currently available for free!

The voting for the latest GBJAM is almost over, here are three GBJAM games that I’ve been made aware of, more most likely exist.

Djoker Soft has forked Hugh’s wxWidgets bindings and adding some missing interfaces, with or has planned OpenFL integration, correct me if I’m wrong.

Angular 2 Haxe by Niall Weedon has reached version 0.3.0 which adds alpha.34 support and “extra build time goodness”.

And to finish this week’s, late, roundup is Franco Ponticelli’s new try.thx-lib.org site, a custom fork of try.haxe.org which shows you through various examples on how to use the thx libraries.