Luxe vs. Kha

[Ashiq A.]

Hi,

Sorry if this is not a haxe-language kinda question. 

Can anyone summarize (preferably from experience) the differences between Luxe and Kha, and how to choose which one is better suited to which types of people/projects?

[Lewis Lepton]

hello,

now i will try all i might in explaining without being too biased in favour of kha, mainly because i do use kha. i make tutorials of it and throughly enjoy it. so just wanted to get that out the way

https://www.youtube.com/c/lewislepton

now with luxe, i have tried it, only briefly mind. mainly because the setup was odd, i found it a little convoluted in the setup itself and also the syntax. i love the idea of it, but some of the execution seems odd to me, which did affect my future with it.

it does hone in to many different platforms, its pretty much acting like many haxe frameworks. but on a different scale. from what i have seen, it is fast. it does perform well. and since it can use on other platforms, its pretty strong for many people. plus have heard many scream at the top of the mountain for it. because like openfl, it does have an easy way to implement but still allows for an open extension for anything. which is great.

i did make a few small things, and whilst i did enjoy coding something out and seeing it play. in general it was not what i wanted, thats why i stopped using it, but fair play to the luxe folks, they are good people.

now with kha.

i was originally using openfl, after a while things such as the flash syntax did confuse me, mainly because i dont like flash, never used it either. so when i saw kha on wwx2015, it really did peak my interest like nothing i had seen before.

mainly the reason is because ive always wanted to use SDL and openGL, but those are c++, which i have used, but it can be an awful beast ;)

so i gave it a look see, didnt shift right away, it did take a week or so. but the syntax makes sense to me, how it works makes complete sense to me. mainly because its like SDL/openGL code but with haxe type code. that for one was a big thing for.

now the power of it is impressive, really is. stupid powerful. ive not seen another framework work the way it does.

plus it can hone in on pretty much everything. if you check out the list on the site for it, its really impressive, and think it works because its also still quite minimal in some ways.

the downsides i would say, is that it is like sdl/opengl, therefore you do not have prebuilt things like many other frameworks. but that does not mean its not hard to do. to do animation in kha has been so easy compared to other frameworks that i have tried previously.

but that downside could act as an up, because then you get to roll out your own thing if you wanted to.

id say that kha has the biggest learning curve, but if you have seen sdl/opengl code, then it looks about the same. luxe looks really nice, many lovely features and is fast.

i do not know if luxe can also do 3d, kha can. kha can do a lot, but again a learning curve.

the best thing to do is to try each of them, spend a day or half a day on both then make your choice.

id say that luxe community is bigger than kha and luxe folks are helpful. kha community is small but is still very helpful.

hope that helps, i know its not too much in luxe favour, but as said, i do use kha now. have tried and played with luxe, but personally it did not fit by needed requests of things

all the best

lewis lepton

lewislepton.com

[Rafael Oliveira]

I use Kha for my projects, but before I used Luxe, but not for much time. I switched because Luxe doesn't have canvas fallback in html5, and this is a requirement for me.
Kha can be compared with SDL, it's more low level (but it's easy to use), you don't have sprites, but methods to draw images, pixels, 3d, and input handling. It doesn't use SDL under the hood (like OpenFL and Luxe), but each target has a specific implementation. And you use different rendering backends (like opengl and directx) in the same api. For me it was easier to implement things that I wanted in a specific way, but others frameworks don't let me do. So it's very flexible, and great if you want total control of your project. Unfortunately it doesn't a have any famous engine like haxeflixel, most users of Kha uses its own engine. But we have a list in the kha wiki.

About Luxe, it's more high level and you can create sprites without need to access rendering functions. But for details we need a Luxe user to explain better.

[Domagoj Štrekelj]

I've very briefly played with Luxe more than a year ago. At the time I was a HaxeFlixel user.

I was looking for something that would give me more control over the code I was writing, and possibly allow me to work on 2D as well as 3D projects.

OpenFL did not interest me because I do not come from a Flash background. Lime lacked documentation, so I did not pursue it either.

Luxe was getting traction. It was different, data-oriented, and offered a component-based design opposed to the usual inheritance-based one. And more importantly, it did both 2D and 3D efficiently.

After a couple of experiments, I noticed that I wasn't "getting it". I could not comfortably fit into the "Luxe mindset" and had to rely on guides, snippets, and sources from previous experiments to get by.

Again, I was losing control over the code I was writing and had to conform to the rules of the framework I was using.

Then I (re)discovered Kha and found in it everything I was searching for. A low-level, cross-platform SDK for multimedia applications with a minimal footprint and no strings attached.

As others have put it, using Kha really is similar to using a library such as SDL. It provides a layer of abstraction over input, sound, graphics, system, and other platform functions. And it's very, very fast.

I'm a tinkerer. I enjoy creating my own tools, and I tend to reinvent the wheel from time to time. Kha lets me do that without worrying that I'll step on any toes in the process.

In summary, Kha is a good choice if you're looking for a low-level API. Luxe is a good choice if you're looking for a high-level API. Comparing features would not be fair as Luxe is still in alpha.