This last week has turned out to be awesome for the Haxe community, with not one, but six releases.
Haxe 3.1.0
On Tuesday, the Haxe Foundation released version 3.1.0 with its main focus being on improved stability and bug fixes.
But this hasnt stopped them from adding new features. Make sure to check out the changelog, or even better yet take the feature tour written by Dan Korostelev in his post Haxe 3.1.0 is here!.
The outdated haxedoc tool has finally been removed and replaced in favor of Dox created by David Peek and Simon Krajewski.
The Haxe API has been using Dox for sometime now, and its been a great improvement over the old API.
Andy Li has been fundamental in getting Haxe passing all its unit tests crossplatform by getting Travis CI and SauceLabs setup.
We possibly wouldnt have had a 3.1.0 released if Cauê Waneck didnt pull a coding marathon in the handful of days before release, whos responsible for the C# target, the Java target, as well as builds.haxe.org and building all the installers.
Even though the Haxe Foundation provides a zip file for Linux users, there are better ways to install Haxe. Kevin who maintains the Haxe Ubuntu PPA has already updated it to 3.1.0, so you're all set.
Even though 3.1.0 was meant to be a stability and bugfix release, a few silly bugs and regressions have appeared. So if you have come across anything, you better try and get it reported before 3.1.1 is released sometime in the next week.
HXCPP 3.1.21
Next up is HXCPP 3.1.21 which goes along side the Haxe 3.1.0 release.
Probably the biggest addition is support for the HXCPP debugger project created by Bryan Ischo from TiVo which has been demoed working in a nightly build of FlashDevelop.
Checkout the Getting started with the HXCPP Debugger guide. Im assuming it's still beta quality as you have to install it with haxelib git.
Garbage collection now uses multiple threads in the mark phase which improves performance on multi-core devices.
Experimental support for MySQL and SQLite modules has been added but they havnt been fully tested. That is something Hugh is work on changing with this thread on the mailing list.
Static linking is now fully supported for the standard modules.
There is a lot more that has been added in this HXCPP release, so make sure to check out the changelog as this is going to effect OpenFL.
OpenFL 1.2.3
The OpenFL team released OpenFL and OpenFL-Native 1.2.3, Lime 0.9.5, Lime-Tools 1.3.0 and OpenFL-DOM-HTML5 1.2.1. These releases include significant improvements to native rendering as well as Android support.
Support for OpenGL 1 and OpenGL ES 1.1 have been dropped in favor of OpenGL 2 and OpenGL ES 2\. You can see the effect this has had in the changelog mainly on OpenFL-Native and Lime with all the rendering improvements.
And for those who like live on the edge, OpenFL now has nightly builds for, what looks to be, everything. I dare you to combine this with the Haxe nightly builds.
Flambe 4.0.0
Flambe version 4.0.0 has been released, which is one of their biggest releases to date, with plenty of new features and fixes.
Flambe can now target Firefox OS, has improved support for the Kindle Fire, Microsoft Surface and iOS 7 and has an improved HTML asset loader.
Some classes and methods have been renamed so its best to consult the handy migrating guide. There are only nine renames, so not too bad.
Again, checkout the changelog for all the details, as I'm not all that familiar with Flambe. Or if you're new to Flambe, checkout the indepth guide created by Mark Knol which is version 4.0.0 compatible.
NME 5.0.0
This one was a surprise, but NME version 5.0.0 has been released or re-released.
Hugh Sanderson, author of the HXCPP target, makes the point to state the NME is not OpenFL, if anything its closer to Lime. NME now doesnt reflect the Flash API like it originally did, but now "inspired" by it.
NME version 5.0.0 has dropped support for all targets except Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Flash. Similar to the latest OpenFL releases, NME has stopped supporting OpenGL ES 1 rendering, now with everything done with shaders.
But NME hasnt just slimmed down, its added WebView support for Android and iOS, also StageVideo support which allows you to play or stream videos and NME can now be statically linked, so no external dependencies.
Its definitally worth the time to read Hugh's post NME 5.0 (re)Released as he goes into far deeper detail on his future plans for NME.
Which leads nicely on to...
Waxe 3.0.0
Hugh also released Waxe version 3.0.0, the wxWidgets Haxe interface, along side NME 5.0.0.
He states that Waxe may appear to have gone backwards a bit, but that it is necessary, as its the first step in giving the project more love and attention.
It also depends on a heavyweight companion project called Waxe-Works which weighs in at ~50M, but this is required to get around some problems building Waxe which has hampered previous versions.
Hugh has hooked Waxe and I assume, HXCPP, NME and their companion projects, into a new nightly builds server.
Haxe.io
And for those that havnt yet noticed, the Haxe Roundups have a new home. Its about time they had their own dedicated site, but I havnt made the progress I had wanted to, which is pretty obvious. As the weeks go by the site will improve.
The plan is to store everything in the git repository and have it all served from S3, with contributions welcome, ranging from a simple typos, which I make all the time, to full articles.
The Haxe Roundup continued...
Lars Doucet has released one of his internal tools, Animator which is used in the upcoming Defenders Quest 2: Mists of Ruin.
Animator is used for viewing, building and colourizing animations and skins into HaxeFlixel based Entity objects. Its not for creating animations from scratch, but more for creating the visual metadata.
Clément Charmet, one of the Haxe SublimeText authors, has hinted at a future Haxe addition, top level autocompletion. It looks like the compiler completion is going to get revamped to provide better information to IDE's.
Fritz Van Deventer has written how to create a Particle Emitter in HaxePunk.
Gamebase have announced that they will showcase their new game engine Reach3dx at GDC. Reach3dx is a new, full featured 3D game engine which provides crossplatform support because its based on OpenFL. Gamebase tools have been used by Disney, Ubisoft, EA, Sony Online, Rockstar Games, Bethesda Studios and more. So thats a pretty good endorsement for OpenFL.
The OpenFL team also over week ago posted New Year, New OpenFL, nearly three months in... Any way, they have gone back on having paid extensions, so now everything is open source. This means the SWF library, in app purchases and the GameCenter extensions are open source.
Definitely read the post as it lists the great achievements OpenFL has achieved.