Impact – HTML5 Game Engine(github.com) |
Impact – HTML5 Game Engine(github.com) |
http://impactjs.com/blog/2018/05/impact-is-now-free-open-sou...
A famous HN headline of 1963 was "JFK returns to Washington after visit to Dallas"
Then he released Ejecta as open source, which was a real game game-changer for me: 60FPS canvas games running on my old iPHone 3G - it was FANTASTIC!
I would have given up on tinkering with HTML5 games along time ago if it wasn't for Dominic, so, if you happen to read this, thank you for all your effort!
(Even better, now that I know Ejecta is also open source, I can have OpenGL and iOS distribution!)
It's nice to see a blog with articles from ~10 years ago that aren't broken! I really like his WebGL rendering of WipEout maps:
http://phoboslab.org/wipeout/ http://phoboslab.org/log/2015/04/reverse-engineering-wipeout...
It's got retro feel, and shows the power of the engine for making scrolling games. Really neat project and I was surprised that it's 8 years old already.
Kids these days are overwhelmed with free stuff, it's likely the reason an engine like this has a hard time making money.
https://github.com/phoboslab/Impact/blob/f461c2f4054dac37dea...
It seems to me this was a big thing back in the day but not really relevant anymore.
If you want a peek behind the scenes of the gamedev check out their YouTube channel [2] to see an archive of their weekly programming stream from Twitch.
This had me laughing. Maybe too honest.
> JavaScript code is executed directly by a JavaScript VM (JavaScriptCore), the HTML5 Canvas 2D and WebGL API is implemented in native code with OpenGL, Audio is implemented with OpenAL. Several other APIs (touch, accelerometer, localStorage, gamepad) behave like those in a real browser.
For example I implemented networking on top of my Impact game with relative ease (networked games are never easy) while layering it on top of my Phaser gamer would've taken longer and with more uncertainty because Phaser is far more opinionated and larger in scope.
It sure is tempting, but not necessarily healthy to the odds that you will ship a game. Though it's also not obvious how much a game engine will help you (like if you'll run into issues with your specific mechanics) until you credentialize in it, so it's always a bit of a crap shoot because games are so open-ended.
For example, I once migrated away from PhaserJS because I couldn't figure out how to add networking and server-side simulation without having more of the physics code in my git diffs.
https://github.com/htmlgames/htmlgames.github.io/tree/master...
Excited to see it open source now, of course. Great opportunity for a community to slowly redevelop and rebuild what once was.
I used Impact as recently as two years ago despite these issues and was able to make a networked game. The code is easy to work with and understand. And I used one of the Node wrappers to get the editor working without PHP.
All the games of my childhood I bought(or pirated) .. were 100% about the game.
vut when I see my niece and nephiew playing and accpeting lots of advertisement all the time in their game, like it's normal, I get a bit sad.
So of course, I push other content to them... but I would say the ordinary kid today, gets a lot worse input today, the I did.
And I would like to see much more real free, open source games out there. But apparently very hard to make money with it..
It's kinda like using https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js for physics instead of Box2D: if p2 gets the job done, then you get the advantage of working with a much simpler code base than Box2D which is just about impenetrable as an emscripten port.