Haxe Roundup № 475

Welcome to the latest edition of the Haxe Roundup. Haxe is a high level, strictly typed programming language and cross-compiler.

Haxe US Summit 2019

• The Haxe Summit is Small Potatoes by Josefiene Pertosa.
• Haxe US Summit 2019 - Announcing the second Haxe Summit in the United States.
• The Haxe US Summit tickets are now available. Tickets are now $450.
• Andy Li - Building Giffon with Serverless and Haxe.
• Hugh Sanderson - XhX - 10 years of Haxe.
• Ryan Davis will talk about using Haxe for database engine building.
• Thomas .J Webb from Osaka Red LLC will talk about audio development with Haxe.
• You can submit your talk proposals for this years US Haxe Summit 2019 via the online form by Josefiene Pertosa.
• Photos from previous Haxe meetups via Josefiene Pertosa.

Community Updates

News and Articles

• Will Blanton has made PT++ - a Playable Trailer in a sense, but it really stands for Pregnancy Test++. He and his wife Julie are expecting twin boys! And this little game is a tribute to celebrate their teamwork!
• Alexander Gordeyko is still looking for a full-time job.
• Simple dice become the heroes in Terry Cavanagh’s newest, Dicey Dungeons - a new article about the game on Polygon.
• Small Untitled RPG Devlog 2 by Peter Achberger.
• A few approaches to utilize Haxe and its targets written by Kevin Leung.
• An overview of how to get a (Haxe) Heaps app built & running on Android.

In case you missed it

• class HaxeFoundation extends Manpower - Alexander Kuzmenko joins the HF as a full-time compiler dev and Aurel Bily joins as an intern for 6 months working on various projects!
• FeathersUI will be fully developed with Haxe and OpenFL by its author Josh Tynjala. He is planning to open a crowd-funding campaign for to fund it. Checkout his blog post about it and announcement on OpenFL forum.
• Haxe 4.0.0-rc.2 has been released!
• Dead Cells had been nominated for 2019 British Academy Games Awards in the Original Property category!
• Announcement trailer for Nintendo Switch version of Double Kick Heroes, a game made with OpenFL.
• Dicey Dungeons by Terry Cavanagh is nominated for Excellence in Design at Independent Games Festival 2019.
• Dead Cells is the Best Action Game of the year at The Game Awards.
• A new article from Jaime Domínguez, How to profile Haxe HXCPP with Visual Studio.
• The Joy of Haxe - FontStruct’s love affair with a neglected programming language.

Videos & Music

• A short interview with David Elahee about Double Kick Heroes made at PAX East 201.
• Video of Sebastien Benard’s talk from GDC 2019 is available now: ‘Dead Cells’: What the F*n!?. Plus presentation slides.
• Add a video related to Haxe.

Upcoming Events & Talks

• There will be a Stencyl Jam from April 12th - till April 22nd. The top three entries will receive a Stencyl Studio license. Sign up now!
• Sebastien Benard, the Lead Game Designer of the Haxe-powered game Dead Cells, is announced as a speaker for the Reboot Development Blue game development conference at 11th-13th April 2019 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
• The next Haxe Summit in Seattle is scheduled for 8th-10th May 2019.
• Haxe transpilation to PHP: static typing, arrow functions, metaprogramming and more by Aleksandr Kuzmenko on 14-15 June at Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2019.
• What’s new in Haxe 4 by Andy Li on 14-15 June at Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2019.
• Add an upcoming event about Haxe.

Job Offers & Bounties

• Playtika are looking for a Haxe programmer to work at their Minsk branch (Belarus). They are maintaining a Html5 version of their C# game engine, so required skills are: C#, Haxe, Javascript & WebGL. Please contact Ed Ryzhov for details.
• The Proletariat Inc team is growing. They are looking for artists, engineers and strong community people. Apply Here!
• Sigma Software have updated their job post and now they are looking for a Senior Haxe Developer.
• CODEFATHER company (Moscow, Russia) is looking for JavaScript/Haxe programmer who will work on extending game engine built with Pixi.js/Haxe.
• Shiro Games are looking for a Game Designer and a Senior Game Programmer to join them.
• Lars Doucet’s latest bounty for $250 is if you can come up with a nice way to unify HXCPP and HashLink C bindings.
• Lars Doucet’s list of various open bounties.
• Add an available job involving Haxe.

Product Releases

• Peasant Knight, the puzzle-platformer has been released (the PC version made with HaxeFlixel) so far on Steam, Switch, PS4, and Vita.
• MacOS build of OTO has been released by Lewis Lepton.
• Version 1.0 of Mondar’s Dungeon was uploaded on itch.io and will be showcased at A MAZE.
• A new Haxe game has been released on itch.io, titled, Hero.

In case you missed it

• OTO is a minimalist platform puzzle game by Lewis Lepton made during the notGDC Jam 2019. And he started development of a bigger version of OTO with more mechanics, more levels, sounds, music!
• fangoals.games is a game by MediaMonks made with Haxe and Pixi.js.
• You can playtest MONDAR’S DUNGEON - a game by Rat King and Jana Reinhardt.
• hidezip.com is a web app by Kevin Leung made with Haxe and Coconut that lets you camouflage an archive file to make it looks like an image file in your file explorer.
• The Heart of Dead Cells is half artbook, half making-of.
• Spellbreak is a new battle royale RPG with epic magic combat by Proletariat Inc..

Code Examples

• An install script for building Haxe 4.0.0-rc.2 from source for Raspberry Pi by Patrick Gutlich.
• Someone asked how you would go about generating ES/TS decorators in Haxe JS, Philippe shows you how to use macros to find annotated fields and generate annotations as static init.
• tink_http local and AWS Lambda setup.
• Have an example you want to add? Consider contributing to the code.haxe.org cookbook.

Previews & Demos

Open Source

• Haxe/PHP extern generator by Alexander Kuzmenko.
• Soon there will be a Haxe port of BigInteger.js.
• FingersRapid continues his work on Craxe, which is a transpiler from Haxe to Nim. This week he implemented switch expression, inheritance, interfaces and brainf**k benchmark.
• SlavaRa continues work on FlashDevelop/HaxeDevelop: now hitting F5 key while debugging won’t start rebuild process.
• LiquidFX (a Blender / Armory3D node that facilitates a simple animated liquid surface using a PBR workflow) had been updated and now it includes:
  • Flipbook animator node.
  • Runtime node (mins, secs, millisecs).
  • Math.floor node.
  • Waterfall (with particles) example.
• A GIF showing the new code generation features in VSCode.
• New generative art sketches by Matthijs Kamstra:
  • sketch.art.CC063
  • sketch.art.CC069
  • sketch.art.CC064
  • sketch.art.CC066 - art blobby thingy.
  • And added Go.wiggle to his tweening engine which you can find at his GitHub.
• Fun with LiquidFX nodes in Armory!
• Damilare with some help from Aidan Lee has hacked together Haxe/C++ bindings for Vulkan. It’s not finished and needs testing but any help will be appreciated.
• I don’t know why but now rabbits drop some grilled meat and the ghost. It’s an updated example for the echo ECS framework.
• Alexander Gordeyko is working on a port of the Moonshine IDE to Haxe. He is using a custom fork of as3hx for it (he took a fork of as3hx by Studio NX as a basis).
• Writing TTF tables using abstract by Nanjizal.

Closed Source

• Patrick Gutlich has made a digital photo frame using an old Laptop LCD panel and a Raspberry Pi . Powered by OpenFL 8.9.0 and Haxe 4.0.0-rc.2. Checkout its guts.
• A lot of GIFs from SHOTDOGS by Alex Johansson:
  • Very happy with the Tuba.
  • A nice little transition screen between the different islands.
  • More subtle animations connecting the islands.
  • Aaaaaalmost beating my high score.
  • Hitching a lift from a pelican.
  • Another look at the level transition.
  • Level transition in action.
• Screenshots and GIFs from the game by Ben Simms:
  • Started to add weapons to the shop.
  • Finally… all the logic for the shop is done.
  • Focusing on the new level select scene.
  • Getting game icon ready. And now we know the name of the game.
  • Decided to update all the games assets.
  • Redone a lot of art!
  • This little duck has been mugging me off for 2 long now! Today I fix that!
• Dicey Dungeons had been on EGX Rezzed. This means that it was in 3 conferences in less than a month (GDC 2019, PAX East and EGX Rezzed). Checkout some new photos:
  • The Dicey Dungeons world tour continues!
  • I think we have found our biggest fan. He did it! He beat the demo with all six characters and still wanted to play, so we started up the last alpha and showed him some of the weirder episodes.
  • Strategy. Dice. Cuteness. SOLD!
  • Last day!
• Double Kick Heroes was at EGX Rezzed too!
• New art from Frontier Story game by jmw:
  • Turnip.
  • Maple’s Seeds and Apothecary.
  • Maple.
  • Crying.
• A few GIFs from Renaine by Octosoft:
  • Never a better time to quench your thirst.
  • A new/improved input buffer. Now you can chain stuff (like rolls) together.
  • You can almost smell that smog.
• The charge shot in Attraction Force gives you another way to build up combos and kick robots off your space station. Plus messed up effects for the HUD.
• GIF and videos from SUPER Cute Alien:
  • Raising the bar. Work in progress.
  • Abstract thingy I’m working on.
• A few funny visual bugs from the unnamed RPG game by Peter Achberger:
  • Tileset parsing bug.
  • Phaser’s secret companion cube (only unlocked if you mess something up).
  • But after 65 hours of work he’s finished basic map and assets preprocessing.
• Mooring bots from Jitter Sandbox by Syo.

Some Library Releases

• json2object 3.6.0
• material-ui 0.14.5
• compiletime 2.8.0
• slick 0.1.0
• miniMasonry 0.1.0
• raven 0.5.0
• cobbles 0.2.0
• bigint 0.1.0
• flixel-templates 2.6.1
• electron 4.1.4
• uglifyjs 0.0.9
• vscode 1.33.0
• react-devextreme 0.3.1
• hxnew 1.0.1
• fuse 0.0.14
• no-vdom 0.4.0
• info 1.0.4
• Checkout the most recent library releases on HaxeLib.

Framework Updates

• [kha] Bitmap baking optimization (over 100x speedup) merged.

People & Projects to support

• Robert Konrad, the Kha author, is creating Programming Toolkits.
• Lubos & contributors are creating Armory, an open source 3D game engine in Blender.
• OpenFL is creating free open source software.
• HaxeUI is creating an open source user interface libraries.
• HaxeFlixel is creating an open source, cross plaform 2D game engine.
• Slava Ra is creating improvements for FlashDevelop and HaxeDevelop.
• Mark Knol is working on Haxe and its documentation.
• Dan Korostelev is working on the Haxe compiler.
• Lewis Lepton is creating tutorials, code and videos.
• Eric Bishton is creating the Haxe plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.
• Will Blanton is creating HaxeFlixel tutorials.
• Matthew Wallace is creating Haxe By Example tutorials.
• August Late is creating unique 2D lighting tech.

Updates from the Haxe core

Current Proposals & Discussions

• Add support for default implementations within interfaces proposal.
• Add support for default type parameters proposal.
• Add polymorphic this types proposal.
• Add Type parameter variance for Enums.
• Add Default values for enum parameters.
• Do you have an idea to improve Haxe? Consider creating a proposal.

Core Changes

45~ commits have been made to Haxe compiler in the last week.

• [display] Macro reification support issue.
• [neko] Fix indexOf and lastIndexOf merged.
• Disallow \xNN for values higher than 127 fixed.
• sys.thread.Thread abstracts merged.
• Unicode sys tests pull request.

In case you missed it

• Fast version of startsWith/ endsWith merged.
• [cpp] Turn on hxcpp_smart_strings by default issue.
• -java-lib on non Java targets issue.
• [nullsafety] haxe.DynamicAccess vs safety issue.
• Final vs never vs null. Again. Pull request.
• [python] Resources are not embedded issue.
• Allow #if (some.field) merged.
• @:using not working on interfaces issue & discussion.
• Static extension @:using doesn’t seem to work on abstract fixed.
• @:using should work on typedefs issue.
• Reconstruct do-loops pull request.
• [php] Improve generation of anonymous objects declaration with a 50% speed improvement issue.

You can get started using the latest features by downloading a nightly build of Haxe.

Take it easy everyone and have a good week!