Forums » Impact Engine » Any update on 2.0?

Here is some information from Dominic's twitter and his plans for 2.0. All that I can gather so far. If you know anymore information please feel free to share.

https://i.gyazo.com/de9fa4d7b2d514c9ad249ed27a2c38e2.png


The reason that Impact Differentiates between other engines is because of Weltmeister. I have not bought the engine, but have seen the making of Xalbia and other videos by Dominic. The way you can add triggers on collision and expand the entity system makes it great. This is a huge differentiator between deciding on other game engines. The editor plays a crucial role. Something that Phaser, and other engines just don't have. (In comparison to Weltmeister's features)

I'm currently using Phaser because of my such gigantic maps and the tiled map export plugin. I'm just not sure if Impact w/o WebGL would be fine for 125x125 (32x32 tiles) 4000x4000 maps with 1280x740 camera viewport rendering the tiles. I think using WebGL would be more appropriate. I also believe a lot of other people might be in the same boat as me by not making the move over. That's why I am eager to know about ImpactJS 2.0 because I would drop Phaser in a heartbeat and buy ImpactJS if it included Weltmeister w/ a WebGL renderer. And ofcourse, don't forgot about Impact++! I'm sure they will be happy to get it working on impact 2.0 as well.

So, I'm just curious Dominic if you do read this. Can we get any sneak peaks of the new Impact? Like a screenshot, or atleast something!

Thanks for gathering the tweets about Impact 2. I hadn't seen the recent ones from Dec. 2015. I'm glad to see there might be version 2 (and open source is interesting)

Curious why you would dump Phaser. I love Impact but from what I have seen and heard Phaser is a good JavaScript engine (most 2D game engines use Tiled and it gets the job done, although WM is great with slope support and entity integration)

As for the current version, My Impact game uses an enormous map as big as you are talking about. I don't experience much lag, but it takes up a lot of memory. Not optimized for mobile but technically works if you want to test performance on a specific device.

Hi Stahl, sorry for the late reply!

Your game is quite unique, I see you spent quite a bit of time on that project and that is is pretty cool to see. I'm glad I'm not the only one making large map games. I really think WebGL is the future for 2d gaming and it's just getting started. I am hoping to see more games like yours come out in the JS world. Especially since we can now use Electron/NW and create very nice 2d games shipped beautifully.

About Phaser.. well, I am over 30k lines of code in but I honestly believe the Weltmeister editor in an Impact 2.0 would convert me over. Although, not entirely sure I would re-convert my those 30k lines but would definitely use it on a new project. If that makes sense. In any event, I just think Dominic has a chance here to really change the way people think about JS games and how interactive they can be. He's done it with Impact already, but that's Canvas's era, now it's time for the WebGL era. I believe he can do it. It's a movement, and I believe he will make WebGL accelerated games great again with 2.0.

There is a stigma out there of 'You need to have a team, build the game using C++, use RPGMaker, etc, etc to make a successful game'. Which is just simply untrue. With the power of JavaScript and WebGL, I hope Dominic can help get rid of that stigma. CrossCode has helped, but we need more like it!

For the tile maps in my game Graina, I use 4 x 4px tiles and render them to an offscreen canvas and update only the changed tiles (60fps stable). But sure, you need some change in the code. Or maybe not, if you use pre-render option in impact if your tilemap is static.

Nowadays a low-end computer and even the iPhones support2048x2048 texture size, so it basically means that you can render even 1080p resolutions for virtually any tilemap size.

And given the fact that offscreen to main canvas blitting is done via GPU acceleration anyway (NWJS or modern browsers), you won't see any lag.

But for the record, I'd love to see Impact2.0 with WebGL support.

Seems Dominic is still working on Impact 2 but no ETA https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/901109401553166336

I would not be against pixi.js integration in 2.0 for WebGL. I'm not sure about Dominic's stance on incorporating libraries into the engine, though.

It'd also be nice to have some integrated build tools for different platforms.

I would love to return to Impact, but it's much easier to create performant games with a simple pipeline in other available engines right now.

so there is no updates ?

Unfortunately I would say it seems that Impact is dead. The last blog post is from almost a year and a half ago and was about Ejecta. The last update to the engine was going on 4 years ago. I think that the success and open-source nature of Phaser has taken a toll. I would consider it unsupported at this time.