Kha has continued to gain attention since WWX2015. Dmitry Hryppa has been working on collecting data from the BunnyMark benchmark with implementations in OpenFL, Kha, MonoGame, XNA and LibGDX. With help from Robert Konrad, the creator of Kha, Kha's results have jumped from 61K, 75k to 131k.
I'm surprised by OpenFL only achieving 30k bunnies, so I tested the app provided in the document and achieved 101k on Win 7, i7 4790K, GTX970. I wasnt able to achieve any sort of drastic improvement in any of the other apps.
Any way, that's enough benchmarketing.
Lubos Lenco has launched Learn 3D with Kha, a place where you can learn to use modern 3D cross-platform graphics API by coding with Kha.
If you have never heard of this Haxe Kha thing, know this - it allows you to do 3D graphics in the most portable and simplistic way, while still being as close to metal as possible.
From Kha to OpenFL, OpenFL officially released 3.1.0!
In OpenFL 3.1 Brings on the Graphics, the OpenFL team talks about the improvements they made to the Graphic class in which the software renderer got switched out in favour of a hardware renderer. By using the Cairo 2D library, also used by Webkit, Firefox and the abandoned Linux Flash Player, the OpenFL team have been able to improve cross-platform rendering consistency. You can see the improvements in the test repository.
Federico Bricker has released two native OpenFL extensions, the first is an extension that allows OpenFL apps to go into immersive mode on Android devices. The second, with help from Daniel Uranga, brings native Harfbuzz support to Lime and NME allowing you to render any language text.
Michael Bernstein recently created and published to the Play Store Total Trouble, created with OpenFL. In Total Trouble you're a cat looking for its dog, using “all of your skills to swipe away to reorganize the tiles, discover the picture and unlock the puzzles”.
Steve Richey has ported Try Harder, by Glitchnap, to iOS using HaxeFlixel and is now available from the App Store for Adult Swim. Try Harder is “not a suggestion. Not a pro-tip. TRY HARDER is a mandate”.
Leong Wai Yin has created and published another HaxeFlixel tutorial, about Fullscreen/Window and Scale Modes.
Tim Hely has started work on a new HaxeFlixel tutorial site, a “a website tool to demonstrate, explain and show off individual concepts of the HaxeFlixel library”.
Dan Ogles from the Proletariat Inc team has published Making Zombies Run Fast in Haxe, in which Dan describes what features contribute to generating fast code and the features he would like added, pushing Haxe's boundaries further.
Jonathan Hirz recently published about his Father's Day Jam game. Jonathan describes it as “a roguelike set in a backyard where a father has to carry his child through dangerous territory with only a bbq spatula for a weapon”.
While not exactly game related, Francesco Agati has written two articles, the first on using HaxeUmlGen a UML generator for Haxe and the second on a library thats new to me, Sure, in which Francesco shows you how to Assert like a Boss.
Adam Retter recently gave talk about using Haxe to create portable EXPath extension functions at XML London. Interested? Check out his slides.
Here is another set of slides from Ryusei, covering Haxe vs Unicode, in which Ryusei talks about the sorry state of cross-platform Unicode support, which leads him on to introducing Unifill, currently the only way to support Unicode, cross-platform.
To finish this weeks roundup off and for those of you still reading, there is a job opening at Massive Interactive at their Prague offices for a UI Engineer. Working remotely is not an option for them.