Forums » Impact Engine » Steering away from bloat

Hi,

I'm loving ImpactJS thus far. I'd just like to raise a minor concern, that starts with Entity.health and the associated method.

ImpactJS is quite slim in many ways. It seems out of place for the framework to be making assumptions, like every Entity needing health and associated methods.

The same can be said (in part) about the physics-related things, such as acceleration, velocity, bounciness, etc, but those at least tie together to form some rudimentary physics that save quite a lot of messing around to implement. As well, they are tied into collision detection. Ideally, I'd like to see separation there as well, as some sort of physics module. But, being new to JavaScript (as in, very new), I can't speak for whether that makes it annoying to deal with for developers if they do want physics.

Or am I totally off? :)

Cheers,
Martin

You can create a stripped Entity with those functions nulled out, or empty. Or Extend the Entity to not check for health, etc.
Obviously, if you're looking at stripping methods to speed things up you may find that having two classes, with one stripped and one not, may be more bloat than having a single class which is re-used with unrequired features.

No doubt, we'll see this develop as time goes on, but for what its worth I've found this engine to be head and shoulders above all the engines I've looked at in terms of maximum frame rate and extendability. Most likely because it is primarily HTML5, and doesn't weigh itself down with making itself work on older browsers.

Which to me, is a good thing.