Genome2d current state (and beyond)?

[Atul Kumar]

Hello Peter,

first of all thank you very much for all your affords in the open source community.. not only for Genome2d but also for Haxe. I saw your presentation on Youtube and thought is was really good.

I not used Genome2d yet, but it looks really great. I am considering using Genome2d and Haxe for a upcoming project. In my company we are mainly working on interactive installations, and I found the Flash runtime ist still a good fit for this kind of Projects. So Genome2d might be a great fit as well.

Main advantages, over for example Starling, for me would be that Genome2d not only targets Flash but also WebGL. Also I would rather write Haxe than Actionscript, and I guess since Genome is also written in Haxe it might be more natural than leveraging Starling.

So he are my actual questions:

How far is the WebGL / Canvas target. Do you consider it production ready? If not, what is missing?

I saw that you are working on 3D stuff. How far is that? How far are u planing to go. Will it be a full fledged 3D solution (like heaps for example) in the near future?

Are there any new plans or a roadmap for a native target? Maybe using Snow / Lime / SDL ?

When targeting AIR, is it easy to leverage the VideoTexture feature (I know this is probably a bit off topic and goes into implementation detail, but is actually a important requirement for me)?

Thank you very much in advanced

[sHTiF]

I've answered you through email before but I will just post the response here as well for others interested in the information.

WebGL currently supports all the batching and 2D renderers so all the standard stuff within Genome2D is supported, however not everything. It isn't possible to render using matrices, you can't use stencil masking, postprocesses/filters etc. Pretty much anything a bit more advanced is not working since it needs its own GLSL implementation. Also no 3D. Atm there are few companies that use the WebGL target for prototyping small stuff but as far as I know there is no one using Genome2D WebGL in production yet so I would consider it beta still.

3D stuff in Genome2D is flash only atm and it is tailored for our needs mostly for 2D iso games using some 3D models. There are no specific 3D optimizations, and I want to avoid those as it would make it a 3D engine which I don't want to. I am not familiar with heaps but as far as I know it is mostly abstract layer over platform dependant stuff it doesn't actually involve specific optimizations for 3D scene rendering does it?

Native target is in the works for some time but due to the excellent AIR and speed of Stage3D it wasn't really necessary yet so I postponed it. I had few working Genome2D renderers through Lime as it seemed like the best solution atm but now with SDL support I am seriously considering SDL.

Didn't try VideoTexture yet but it shouldn't be a problem, is there a specific usecase for VideoTexture otherwise it is just up to Stage3D to handle that so if it works Genome2D is supporting it.