Forums » Help » A few pre-purchase questions

Hi everyone

I'm thinking of picking up impact and have a few questions:

1) Am I correct that Impact doesn't have a Tween engine built into it? If not, is there a popular plugin people use for this? The only one I could find is impact-tween but it was last updated 4 years ago.

2) I noticed some people using impact-dev-server to get Impact running through node, but from the bits and pieces I could find on these forums there were some limitations with Weltmeister. Does impact-dev-server work ok? Any features/functionality you have to give up to use it?

3) Is it possible to use the Box2D raycasting to test directly against entity colliders? I'm using Phaser right now and it has line casting but it only hits other lines, which is pretty clunky. Coming from Unity it's super handy to be able to fire a ray out and test if it hits a collider.

Thanks!

1) Correct, Impact does not have a built in tween engine. The impact-tween plugin is old, however it works well enough for me. Tweening is really quite a simple thing, so I wouldn't be worried about the age of that plugin.

2) No comment.

3) It is possible to use Box2D and raycasting to test for hits against other entity bodies, world bodies, or sensors. Pretty sure what you're asking for can be done.

1. I wrote my own not-so-great one. You should use impact-tween.

2. I wrote impact-dev-server mostly 'cuz XAMPP is overkill. It's 100% compatible with Weltmeister. AND I'LL HAVE WORDS WITH ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE. Just kidding. But I will fix any bugs you find, so... go for it.

I like Weltmeister better than Tiled, but maybe that's 'cuz I'm used to it and I'm kind of philosophically opposed to GTK apps. What issues are you thinking about specifically?

3. Joncom's got the answer there.

You've been using Phaser but you're thinking about going to Impact? Most people go the other direction. What's missing from Phaser, or what don't you like about it? What kind of game are you thinking about making?

As for Node.js, I have not tried impact-dev-server

But I have been using impact-node

The developer makes frequent updates and in addition to a few features like watch, it has its own baking / minifying that makes more compact files than the one that comes with Impact. Source files and build are put in separate folders.

Thanks for the answers guys.

@drhayes: Oh you made impact-dev-server? That's awesome. Just about every post I go to in these forums you are in, so cool to know you made it :D

As for why I'm thinking Impact, it's mostly for the API. Phaser is cool, but the API just seems 10x too large for what it is. I think it's a cool library, but with the size of the API it feels inconsistent at times. I like the fact that the Impact API is so simple and clean.

good to know that impact haven't been updated in 6 months making it more or less dead and with only one contributor I would suggest looking at phaser.js.

Don't get me wrong I really like impact.js and it have a really good base with entity-component system, gamestates, animationsheets, bitmapfonts, arcade/box2d physics etc. It have a lot of good fundamental framework support. Nothing more nothing less. And it is just enough so you can make games with it.
Do you want more stuff than that you have to either find some old plugin or create it yourself.

I will continue making stuff with impact, its lightweight and modular.

@boolean: Joncom is the true Impact forum hero, but thanks for noticing. ( =

And I hear you about the API. Impact's API is very understandable and focused, very well-designed. Absolutely its best strength. When you start making a game it's easy to see what the next steps are, where you have to go, what you can extend. And this community is truly amazing.

BUT. I'm working on this game that I'm about a year away from completing. I'm the type of dev that reads documentation for fun, and I've been reading the Phaser docs for a few months by this point. So I thought, what the heck, lemme give myself two weeks to port it to Phaser and see how far I get, what kind of code reduction am I gonna see.

At the end of two weeks I think I have to go with Phaser. Phaser let me replace in about twenty lines things I was doing with four separate entities. Its tilemap support is not nearly as great (no repeating backgrounds without manual work, no built-in collision system) but once I got that working (three nights) the rest was kind of a breeze. Tiled isn't so great compared to Weltmeister but oh well.

So I'm torn. I recommend Impact for people wanting to make games, yeah. Especially if they're just starting out, or want to prototype something, or are exploring a mechanic and want the engine out of the way.

But I also think you might reach a point where the amount of code you write to support the corners of your game in Impact might have been better spent learning the frickin' huge and sprawling and monolithic API of Phaser.

@drhayes: That's very interesting, really great to hear the perspective from both sides of the fence.

I think maybe I'll have another crack at Phaser, but I also think I'm going to start making my own, smaller version of their documentation. I think if I can chop out 80% of the stuff that just gets in the way and format in a less horrible layout it might be ok.

By the way, the game you converted to Phaser, I don't supposed you have that online do you? :)

I always use TweenMax for my projects. There's a forum thread on here where it's explained how to make it sync with Impact's framerate.
I heard that Phaser's documentation changed for the worse a while back, now it's in this bloated blog format and hard to browse, which really put off a friend of mine's that's been using it. Impact is pretty concise and easy to use, as well as easily expandable. You should try it out, it's pretty inexpensive and it's been tremendous value for me at least.

Nah, still have about a year or so to work on it. I'm doing the art, music, and programming/design myself so it'll be a while. Thanks for the interest, though!

@Krisjet: I actually like how the documentation changed recently! It gathers the methods and properties into easily browsable tables of content instead of making you scroll down this huge list to get to them.

That said, I use Dash to browse documentation offline and this Phaser docset. It's just stupid fast that way.