Thinking about making game in HaxeFlixel and trying to confirm if it's the right choice, or just use the good old flash pro.

[Marcin Korba]

Hello i'm currently developing game which is from genre rpg/sim. I'm using rpg game maker engine but in august it becomes public that send promoting emails with new engine, so my project was stalled for waiting what new engine is really capable. So i have a time and decided to try other game engines if the content i would create is really better than rpg maker. My choice comes to flash, it's not because flash is or was pretty popular and is able to play only through browser without any additional installation, for me the choice was made because it's support vector graphic.

Many may ask why i want use a vector art i would answer the scalability and details. What i mean is that i plan to use vector art for characters (both player and npc) which will be fully customizable e.g. in rpg maker i made script called by me dynamic sprite system which was basically merge sprites for body and clothes into one, both of them recoloring and using right sprite depends on equipment, here in flash i want the same with addition of different height of characters depends on defined height which through pixel art looks ugly since it's visible where we add/remove pixels. The second thing details i want to be able see fingers in hand/foot even the entire sprite isn't large that takes half of viewport, and for it also create similar  gloves that will look like gloves not some rectangle in which we can only view gloves in our mind. My idea is to create hundreds of characters each one with unique cloth set, which is freely changeable to other set of clothes from other characters, so basically i will use large amount of assets which also better to use vector art for it.

Also i would want to create customizable colors of clothes/characters/hairs etc. in assets, so we can freely color our hair (or any other character in game) to white color. To be truthfully i don't know yet if something like that is possible in this engine so i would need try first.

So what i want to use in game is dynamically rendered characters with current equipped clothes, of course the character be changed if we remove or equip additional piece of equipment, similarly i use dynamically rendered portrait for character but since it doesn't really required detailed work or scalability i can use this rendered bitmap from method called when we change equipment. So my first question is it is possible to create dynamic characters from vector art?

The Second question is simpler while the characters are need to be vector art, the map is needed to be tilemap with normal bitmap tiles. I know i read tutorial and it support tilemaps but my question is what type of tilemaps it's support?? Only traditional or also isometric, I wanted to try with isometric game since it requires to make fewer art if we use only 4 direction movement, So the question is simple is it support isometric maps or not?

The third one is about performance. What size of tilemap support HaxeFlixel without loosing framerates, for me the tiles are size 64x64 with npc being larger (mainly in height), also how many actors (characters drawn in vector art) can possibly support on one map (take account that each individual might play different animation since as sim game we will gather materials to expand our town).

Thats all i wanted to know for now, and i thanks in advance for any of answers.

[SruloArt]

* You can use vector-art with the haxelib's SWF library. You can find more info about that searching here and asking in the OpenFL forum.

* There's already a project made by Lars Doucet that builds and recolors a sprite character using spritesheets: https://github.com/HaxeFlixel/flixel-editors

* There's a Haxe RPG library by Kevin Resol, which has a HaxeFlixel implementation: https://github.com/kevinresol/hare (there are more examples on Github).

* There's an isometric library that should work well enough: https://github.com/Masadow/FlxTilemap (+Tiago-Ling) and a simple iso implementation by MSGhero: https://github.com/MSGhero/Iso/tree/master/iso

* Map size isn't a real variable, you can create as many maps as you'd like from one big map and then load each one when and where it's appropriate / fits performance, or only show/load a small portion of your map based on the Player's location.

* Performance (blitting based) is good if you know what you're doing. Don't expect too much though, it's Flash. Now, there's a Stage3d (gpu) implementation being worked on in the dev branch but I don't know what's its status, and if it would actually help in terms of performance or even be available any time soon.

* Integrating all of that requires some coding-skills and a good familiarity with Haxe and HaxeFlixel. If you're very new to all of this I would recommend you to go with something like Unity.