After a short break from writing the roundup, lets get started with all the new library releases.
Hugh Sanderson started the new year by releasing NME 5.2.7, NME dev-1.3.5 Waxe 3.1.1 and GM2D 3.2.5. The majority of changes appear in NME, a few of them being that NME is fully separated from Lime, building with MinGW is now possible and the text rendering has been reworked. You can find more detailed info in the announcement post.
HxScout which has been mentioned frequently in past roundups, has been released to the general Haxe and AS3 communities. With the new website by Jeff Ward providing pre-built binaries for Windows, OSX and Linux, both communities now have an in-progress open source alternative to Adobe Scout.
Carlos Ballesteros Velasco has created native bindings to Cairo which “produces consistent output on all output media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration”.
Jeremy Sachs has released version 1.2 of his Golems library to haxelib and GitHub. Golems is a “macro backed, simple cross-platform Haxe worker system with its goal is to make it easier for developers to benefit from Haxes targets concurrency features”. The 1.2 release fixes a few issues here and there, with the GitHub README greatly improved.
Justin and Giuseppe Di Mauro have teamed up to work on hxDaedalus which is a port of the AS3 version by Flash Cedric. HxDaedalus “manages 2D environment modeling and pathfinding” with a focus on speed and accuracy.
The library compiles to Flash, JavaScript, Java and with the aid of NME or OpenFL can run on any of their supported platform targets. With it being able to compile to JavaScript Canvas you can view three of its demos, Basic, Pathfinding and Maze. If built with OpenFL, its possible its version might run faster.
Lubos Lenco has been busy porting the file format OpenGEX which is a “text-based file format designed to facilitate the transfer of complex scene data between applications such as modeling tools and game engines”, so it can be used in his game framework Fox “a game framework that integrates Blender and Kha into one experience”.
And it seems the first third party Fox powered demo has been created by Devin Curry.
Tilman Schmidt has once again created a demo, which is very suitable for New Year's, the GPU particle fireworks sim powered by luxe engine.
Nico has teamed up with Compost Face who created the sweet visuals in the mock below, powered by luxe engine.
Another luxe engine demo has been created by Darek Greenly whose been impressed at the speed he is able to progress by using snõwkit.
Moving away from demos to releases, which there has been quite a few over the holiday.
Caribou has created PODStream which will “serialize and deserialize your fields to and from a ByteArray” using the power of macros and metadata.
Vadim has created a “program that aids in making actual (TTF) pixel fonts from images” using Haxe and his alternative OpenFL HTML5 backend open-bitfive. Head over to Vadim's site to read Introducing BitFontReader and consider supporting him through Patreon.
The 3D Worlds of Namide 3 by Namide was created using Haxe and the Heaps library. You are able to choose to run the art through Flash or WebGL. Its a beautiful piece of generative art, definitely take a look at it.
Ben Merckx of Expansion RTS, a “real-time space strategy game for mobile, desktop and browsers featuring an intuitive and simple interface for a flawless gaming experience” will be released soon and uses Haxe and OpenFL.
Friendly Cat have released Pink Birds, a game with the goal of shooting the pink birds, not the blue ones, has been released to the Google Play Store and the App Store.
Mu Complex Episode One created by StudioCime and PND, the lead developer using on Haxe. With over 225k plays since its release back in November, Mu Complex is a successful puzzle game requiring skill and a ... computer.
Jonas Nyström has released a UFront Playground which allows you “to find out what's possible when it comes to isomorphic solutions (same code on client and server)”.
Franco Ponticelli has written a great explanation on what Haxe Abstracts are and what's their proper use over on StackOverflow. While on the topic of Haxe Abstracts, Francesco Agati has created an Abstract wrapping jQuery with operator overloading included.
Both Mark Knol and Vadim seem to have had the same idea, to create the Haxe logo through try.haxe.org for both supported targets, JavaScript and Flash. Checkout Mark's version and Vadim's version.
The team over at Happy Technologies have written WebApp Component Oriented Programming in which they talk about using Haxe and AngularJS together.
Ashes has written the article Animated GIFs in HaxeFlixel which uses YAGP to have large animated backgrounds display on mobile devices.
Peter Boyer has started porting verbnurbs.com to Haxe. Verb is “a JavaScript library for creating and manipulating NURBS surfaces and curves in the browser or node.js”.
I'll finish this monolithic roundup with a video from Joshua Granick, OpenFL's New Year update and the plan moving forward.