Forums » Impact Engine » Any news on impactjs 2.0 or further updates for current version?

Hello, does anyone heard about any news if Dominic will be giving another update for current version or some things he has confirmed for 2.0?

Can't say. However, the implication here is that 2.0 would bring something that 1.x doesn't already have.

Personally, I wouldn't much care if there never was a 2.0 because 1.x already lets me do nearly anything I'd want to. It provides that backbone.

If you want network capabilities, well, that's been done plenty of times already.

If you want new features or functionality, well, plugins have been here all along.

It's nice to see things improved and updated, but adding an "extra" onto something that already feels "complete" could just be considered "noise".

Obviously this is just my opinion...

What do you feel should be added in 2.0?

I use impact at least 2 days a week.
Mostly client stuff and bigger projects.
So these are the features i would like to see be a part of impactjs core and why.

Lightning and shadows system.
For me this seams to be the missing feature right now.
Getting this right and easy to work with on a entity level and maybe scale it down ( turn if off) for mobile.

Better Gui/hud system
touch. Gamepad, mouse.
Like the touch button plugin but that support any type of input.
Its tedious to create UI systems and buttons without some extra layers of logic and then need to handle touch and mouse differently.

Physics system
The build in arcade physics are great.
Add support for round shapes or to be able to rotate the collsionbox.
The box2d integration works.
But it would be nice with some more documentation on this.
How do i easily create a chain etc.
maybe even look at P2.js

Screen FXs
So it get the request quite often to develop tinting or blendmodes, blur effects and masking. So these are usually done with the canvas itself and can be a real memory hog. I want to have a official support for this. Maybe even though pixi.js rendering if that is needed.
A good particle system would be nice to have in place.

Tweening
So there are some great tweening plugins out there.
Would be nice to have it as a official part of impact.

SpriteSheets and animations
More support basically, in place animation callbacks.
Animation blending/smoothing.
Or http://www.goodboydigital.com/pixi-js-spine-animation/

Camera
More built in camera love.
And the really hard part zooming and scaling.

Pause
Just a more robust basic pause function.

Fonts
More text options. There is a lot of plugins for this already.

So most of these stuff can be done with plugins already developed for impactjs
But it would be better if they could be part of the core and make sure they work if/on updates.

Ability to put in Ads or IAP would be great as well.

We don't hear from Dominic these days. Do you still come to this forum Dom?

My opinion/wishlist on the subject is that a 2.0 version could use:

Webgl: Something like Pixi.js for rendering, with canvas fallback.

WebAudio: Something like Howler with audiosprites and fallback to normal HTML5 audio, because mobile, safari and internet explorer.

Better input handling: multitouch and gestures by default, maybe controller.

Weltmeister: ported to node.js

Bake: as a grunt task. (I may end up doing this myself).

Everything else is best left to plugins. GUI, Camera, Physics, Lighting Effects, and Screen effects systems are too game/platform specific. (I LOVE the fact that Impact is so minimal).

Also, I would gladly pay again fullprice for 2.0 (Impact has made me over a 100 times it's license cost, so yeah.)

I would even put money on a kickstarter/indiegogo for it.

PS: By the way ES6 is a given, it wouldn't make sense to develop it in ES5

I would also pay for an Impact 2.0 that had some of the features you've mentioned. I would hope the core would not change much at all. It works great. But better audio support, Node.js, Bake as a Grunt task, Ejecta that supports Mac App Store, that would be worth paying for an upgrade.

Honestly a lot of the things listed on here are things that people have developed, but have just not maintained because they've moved on to other projects. Impact++ offers quite a bit of these things. I've personally gotten to the point of, if I want anything in impact that I'll just need to write it myself. Dom writing WebGL support directly into impact would be a great feature and would save me having to do so, but pretty much everyone has the tools in front of them to extend impact as they like.

I haven't started working on it yet but I expect I'll be integrating howler.js into my game when I start getting serious about sounds and music. I haven't looked at it closely but I suspect it's mostly a matter of integrating Impact's loader with holwer's. I'll open-source it when I do and let y'all know.

The WebGL thing's been getting to me recently. I'm worried my game, which is going to take me around a year or two to finish, is going to fall behind. Pixi.js does a lot of nice stuff! But maybe it's stuff I don't need yet? I dunno.

@drhayes Impact now uses web audio by default, so there's no need to use Howler (actually it broke all my extensions based on the old API :-p).

The advanced stuff you could do with web audio does not have a fallback that is not jarring, so for now I'm just using Impact's default.

Ah, was not aware of that! I've basically been holding off on doing sounds at all for The Game, so hadn't looked closely at the Impact API for sounds. And since my release target is likely node-webkit there's no need for a fallback. ( ;

I'll probably still either use howler.js or WebAudio directly so I can do some slightly more controlled sound stuff, like syncing the music to what's happening in the environment, playing with the spatial stuff, etc.