TIGSource: flixel

flixel

Derek Yu — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:50:00 +0000

Adam “Atomic” Saltsman’s Flash game API flixel is out. It’s a vastly-improved version of the engine he used to create his popular web games Gravity Hook and FATHOM.

Features:

- High performance 2d Flash rendering
- Lots of retro game physics and effects built-in
- Easy to learn, uses no Flash libraries or Flash classes
- Object-oriented Actionscript 3
- Includes the source code for a complete game
- Forums to help collect tutorials and whatnot

And the online documentation is generated dynamically by Ivan “toastie” Safrin’s Nanodoc system.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world just became a better place to ~~make games~~ exist in.

"flixel" by Adam Atomic

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:46:27 +0000

Starting to accrue some tutorials!

http://flixel.org/forums/index.php?topic=6.0

Also one major bugfix :)

"flixel" by Adam Atomic

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:03:47 +0000

Raigan - yea flash 10 especially has a pretty efficient CPU process. In my experiments the major bottleneck for Flash performance is their vector renderer, it probably consumes 90%+ of CPU for most games. Flixel’s performance is derived mainly from opting out of the vector renderer whenever possible. However, I even opt out of many small or empty functions by doing the check for visibility (and other similar state variables) at the game loop level, so it won’t even call render() if you have visible toggled.

Melly - yea I just don’t have time to put together that sort of stuff myself, I am somewhat selfishly hoping that I can trade my free-code karma for some help from the community with the tutorials :) I think that in the coming weeks our support materials are going to improve a lot.

Sparky - thanks! yeah that’s why I have links out to Gravity Hook, FATHOM and mode from the home page. I have a couple other games I built with it but they’re not AS impressive. I’m hoping to eventually have little screenshots from like 20 games on that front page!

"flixel" by Sparky

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:01:13 +0000

Adam, this is looking pretty sexy. I think having a stable of demo games already out will really help convert people.

"flixel" by Melly

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:19:16 +0000

Trying to look into this, but I have no experience with using external frameworks in Flash, so it’s being a bit difficult. The forums offer little help at this point besides showing how to compile the demo.

Still, I’m awfully interested.

"flixel" by raigan

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:20:19 +0000

@Zaphos: my main issue is “wtf is ‘the auto-fill algorithm’?!”

I’m hoping there’s some easy way to extend the collision/tile stuff to support arbitrary-shaped tiles.

At any rate it’s great to see a good example of a non-movieclip-based (i.e direct blitting) graphics system like this.

One tiny nit-pick about the news post above: “Easy to learn, uses no Flash libraries or Flash classes”

The former may be true (i.e no need for mx.* or whatever), but the latter is wrong.. you can’t avoid depending on the flash.* classes, that’s the runtime that everything depends on!

I really really like how simple and straightforward everything is. For instance, using a .visible flag in sprites and doing “if(!visible)return;” inside the render() method, rather than relying on a complex bookkeeping system (i.e an explicit list of visible sprites is tracked and only those sprites have their render method called). It’s just so nice and simple!

It’s also great to see that Flash is finally fast enough to handle thousands of empty/trivial function calls without the function call overhead becoming an impediment.. hooray!!

"flixel" by toastie

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:28:38 +0000

I’ll make some updates to nanodoc in the next couple of days and add search and stuff to it and fix the weird truncation problems.

"flixel" by Zaphos

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:27:56 +0000

Also, I forgot to say I’m really looking forward to trying this!

Hopefully more tutorials / samples will come out as more people start using it :)

"flixel" by moi

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:23:15 +0000

Nice, but nanodoc is not extraordinarly helpful dawg.

"flixel" by namuol

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:20:20 +0000

Awesome.

Documentation is sexy but sparse… I’ll have to check out the forums once I get out of work.

"flixel" by Zaphos

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:34:30 +0000

It should say “The number of “empty” tiles to add to the auto-fill algorithm (e.g. 8 tiles + 4 empties = 1/3 of block will be open holes)” … (if you check the as file you can see, I guess the html creator thing truncated at the slash)

"flixel" by raigan

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:57:19 +0000

This is really awesome!

But.. I’m having a hard time figuring out some stuff, for example in the FlxBlock constructor:

Empties: uint The number of “empty” tiles to add to the auto-fill algorithm (e.g. 8 tiles + 4 empties = 1

..?!

"flixel" by Adam Robezzoli

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:51:07 +0000

It’s time to return to Flash. I’m really excited about this.

"flixel" by Paul Eres

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:50:47 +0000

will definitely try this out, thanks adam

"flixel" by Firesword

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:33:51 +0000

Amazing.

"flixel" by Juan Sierra

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:07:23 +0000

WOW! After years of trying to find the perfect AS3 game engine, it’s here. I knew it was possible

"flixel" by Corpus

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:01:21 +0000

You have a plethora of personal agendas, Skofo.

Can’t wait to try this out! June 18th is my day of freedom, and I will be all over flixel.

"flixel" by Eclipse

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:29:30 +0000

so is it for flex? cool, i’ve already my little flash engine that’s quite fast and all, but nice to see new interesting libraries that aren’t for that sucky Flash IDE

"flixel" by bateleur

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:10:15 +0000

flixel is not intended to be used with the Flash IDE, since it is a pure Actionscript library

Not “intended” perhaps, but it will work just fine.

"flixel" by !CE-9

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:48:58 +0000

transformation time again? it quite possibly is.

"flixel" by Skofo

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:32:20 +0000

Even though I have a personal agenda against Flash, I have to admit that that is quite kickass. It looks really easy to make games with this. If only this was out when I was dabbling with Flash; it’d save me a lot of pulled hair…

"flixel" by raiten

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:08:48 +0000

Awesome, best reason to move to AS3 yet.