up to date? portable?

[Raoul Duke]

hi,

I've done NME/OpenFL, and HaxePunk stuff before. Am interested in
researching awe6. It has been a while and my machine got somewhat
wiped recently so I just reinstalled everything which means I am on
latest published stable Haxe 3.2.1 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit.

But... I tried the demos/openfl stuff and it fails to build at all on
my Linux box due to hardcoded Windows style file paths. That makes me
scared other parts of awe6's ecosystem are also just assuming the
universe only runs on Windows? :-} Once I changed the paths to match
my Linux setup (forward slashes, correct path to haxelib) then the
html5 target worked, except that the fonts were really fuzzy?

This Google Group list shows as being quiet since 2015? A little scary
to me when contemplating adoption. Though I do see the github commits
being active! :) I would have expected there to be more than zero open
issues, unless issues are mainly tracked in some other way; no code is
ever without issues.

thank you.

[Rob Fell]

Raoul, thank you for your interest in awe6.

https://github.com/hypersurge/awe6/wiki/Quick-Start

Some of the tooling is built to embrace third party tools (e.g. FlashDevelop which is Windows-only) so there may be an awe6 tooling bias towards Windows?  That said the haxelib "run" commands (below the fold) are standalone, have slash modifiers and were tested on a variety of platforms at the time of their creation (including Linux):

https://github.com/hypersurge/awe6/blob/master/lib/awe6/extras/Run.hx

If they no longer work as they should, or if you encounter any other issue please open a new ticket, The historic documented issues were typically resolved and closed within a few days.

https://github.com/hypersurge/awe6/issues

OpenFL support is not a priority to me, so if unreported it may be currently broken?  Please note it was time consuming to regularly patch OpenFL's updates, reinstall several hundred MBs of third party libs and run multiple tests across various platforms.  I remain unconvinced of the strategic benefit after SWF+AIR+Stage3D was stable, and the OpenFL+HTML5 capabilities & performance were insufficient for our clients' production needs - so ongoing awe6+openfl support is unlikely to come from me.

Since 2013 my team transitioned from SWF+AIR to CreateJS.  Therefore the awe6+createjs drivers are up-to-date and work cross-platform as-is (get the latest from Github).  As of 2017 we develop a game or two a month using awe6, it serves us well as a common core and it powers millions of gameplays (mostly in mobile-browsers).  We hope it helps someone else out too, but beyond that we have no ongoing plans to achieve broader adoption.  Therefore this group should probably be closed, with new comments, issue and suggestions posted directly to Github issues?

Best wishes, Rob

[Raoul Duke]

Got it, thank you for the updates. Very educational to hear insights & experience from folks who have really been in the thick of the history of haxe libraries :-)

[Sidar Talei]

OpenFL support is not a priority to me, so if unreported it may be currently broken?  Please note it was time consuming to regularly patch OpenFL's updates, reinstall several hundred MBs of third party libs and run multiple tests across various platforms.  I remain unconvinced of the strategic benefit after SWF+AIR+Stage3D was stable, and the OpenFL+HTML5 capabilities & performance were insufficient for our clients' production needs - so ongoing awe6+openfl support is unlikely to come from me.

Today I cloned Awe6 to see how things are implemented. About 2 years ago I gave it a shot to add a new driver and wanted to give it another try. So far only just reading the classes and how things flow.

Regarding your complaint to OpenFL, it's exactly why I'd love to see  Kha work with Awe6. The backend support that comes with Kha opens a lot of doors and targets such as HTML5/Webgl perform absolutely great. And Kha barely breaks anything, if not at all, when it's updated. 

My problem is that I'm not well versed in IoC and it's much harder to fully grasp on how to implement some of Awe6s aspects with Kha. I'd love if someone from your side would experiment with Kha to see if it's viable as well. I believe it is at least.

I'll see how far i'll get this time.

Don't mean to hijack this thread.

Cheers

[Rob Fell]

Cool - I think a Kha driver for awe6 would work well.  Although I am unsure what pain it would solve given the alternatives available?  I did briefly experiment a couple of years back with Kha and was impressed, however I found the initialisation delay for the WebGL output to be less than ideal for instant mobile web games.  Hardware has come a long way since, so this concern may now be mitigated.

Implementation considerations for a Kha-awe6 driver:  Without an inbuilt scene graph some extra layer will be needed (iirc there is a Kha scene graph extra lib).  Same may be true for audio, user-inputs etc?  Use this as starting point (some hints are inlined in the classes):

https://github.com/hypersurge/awe6/tree/master/lib/awe6/core/drivers/remap

Reviewing the existing CreateJS driver may be useful to reveal what driver specific functionality is needed vs what exists as core awe6 functionality.  IoC shouldn't come into it as these are classes using inheritance / extension.

https://github.com/hypersurge/awe6/tree/master/lib/awe6/core/drivers/createjs

I am happy to help, perhaps raise as issues on Github?  Thanks.

[Sidar Talei]

I don't know how long ago it was that you tried but kha has definitely seen some major changes 2 yearish ago for its rendering api.

I might be a bit bias but considering Kha has a simple API that governs a lot of backends you never really have to do anything platform specific.

So if Kha is implemented you have all the backends at your disposal as well as any upcoming backend. Currently there already is a WiiU backend and trough the Windows Apps backend you can deploy to XboxOne as is*.

Kha goes beyond OpenGL and also supports metal/vulkan/dx12 and Audio isn't stuck to one either.

Frankly I haven't seen anything like Kha among haxe. It's already proven to be future proofing itself by having a robust backend system that isn't dictated by OpenGL.

Nothing against OpenFL but as you said, it is much harder to keep patches incheck with every openfl update, I don't believe this to be the case with Kha.

Thanks for the pointers ill take a look. I am looking at the creatjs driver indeed most of it seems straightforward, my concern is more with context and view. But like you said I'd had to create my own container/displayobject.

*Robert( author ) or anyone else can only create a backend for consoles if the SDKs are provided. If you can prove you have an official SDK he provides the backends for free.