

Flixel: flash game framework - rms
http://flixel.org/

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chipsy
I've poked around with this. It's becoming a popular choice for Flash games,
although I'm not using it myself. It's not sophisticated or even really that
efficient(one object instance per tile? per particle? You can make AS3 go much
faster now with Bytearray or Vector based solutions), but it's easy to start
with, gives you some basic graphical features, and perhaps most importantly,
is a working solution for escaping the Adobe-centric toolchain.

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AdamAtomic
one instance per particle seems inefficient but most computers can handle it,
especially if they don't collide, and it gives you a ton of fun flexibility
(using an emitter to spawn a flock of enemies, for example, or emitting
particles that then emit more particles, etc).

Tiles however are NOT a collection of unique instances, they are blitted
relatively efficiently. They do use a single instance of an empty collider to
do the actual collision check, but otherwise they're pretty fast.

BUT that's not to say that flixel is not a work-in-progress with a fair number
of broken or unoptimized elements :) I have a list of...oh I guess i'm down to
about 20 things that have to be fixed or revised before the next big public
whatever!

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midnightmonster
you mentioned that the iphone canabalt was done with a port/version/something
of flixel, too? can you give any details about that?

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AdamAtomic
can't yet, but I will have good news about that stuff soon i hope!

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khangtoh
An AS3 to objective-c framework? If that's the case, I love to talk to you a
little bit more. LeftRight Studios, based in Pittsburgh, is my startup and we
develop mobile games.

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shaunxcode
I believe the latest version of flash builder is supposed to provide the
ability to compile from flash -> iphone app directly.

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SlyShy
For those of you who aren't aware, that Canabalt game that was posted on HN
earlier was written with Flixel.

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nopinsight
How is Flixel compared to Push Button Engine and Always 3D?
<http://pushbuttonengine.com/> <http://away3d.com/> (used in the Facebook game
Cafe World)

I'm looking forward to use such a framework/engine in my upcoming multi-player
Flash game. I'd be grateful if anyone here can offer me some advice/links
about this.

(My impression is that Push Button Engine is more mature and probably better
supported because there is a company behind it. Is that really the case?)

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nopinsight
A list of Object-oriented Flash Game Framework:

[http://www.idevgames.com/news/object-oriented-flash-game-
fra...](http://www.idevgames.com/news/object-oriented-flash-game-framework)

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Luc
Does Flixel (what's in a name) somehow depend on the grapics being pixelated,
or does it also handle vector graphics? I had a quick look through the
documentation but didn't really find anything about this?

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robfitz
You can still use anything native to Flash (ie vectors). Flixel has added
support for bitmaps -- fast blitting plus old school visual effects (are
typically a great pain to create in Flash)

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mcav
I'm working on some casual card/board games, so unfortunately I can't really
use Flixel since it wasn't designed for that (primarily vector images, uses
events rather than game loop to keep CPU low). But Flixel looks great, and I
wish there was a library that could do what Flixel does, except geared for
that use case. If only Canvas was up to the task of handling vector images and
animations as well as Flash does.

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teamonkey
Does an event loop really keep the CPU use down in Flash? In C/C++ I've always
found that the event polling overhead means that it's ever so slightly less
efficient than a game loop, but not so much so that it matters. I thought it
was purely a matter of taste?

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mcav
When Flash isn't rendering to the screen (i.e. via constant blitting), it
hardly consumes any CPU at all. In my experience, blitting the screen 30fps
causes a lot of CPU load even when you aren't doing anything.

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teamonkey
You don't want to render stuff you don't have to regardless of the method you
use.

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Nosferax
Isn't there something better than flash out there? Flash sucks for linux.

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mcav
Not if you want it to run in a browser.

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warfangle
I guess Canvas is out of the question, if you want folks on IE to be able to
use it.

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mcav
There are canvas emulators that make Canvas more or less functional in IE,
albeit with a speed hit. But even then, Canvas isn't designed to do the same
things Flash excels at: vector-based animation.

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warfangle
True - for that, you could use scripted SVG.

