Forums » Help » Will Impact Work For Me?

I am about ready to pull the trigger on ImpactJS but given that there is no free trial I wanted to exercise extra caution, even given the fact that there is a money back option if it doesn't work out.

I watched the weltermeister (I think it's called) video tutorial on how to do pong in Impact and am excited with the possibility of using an actual level editor to layout my game. I am, however, concerned about the limitations it may have.

I'm making a game where the UI is largely spritesheet based. There will be 8 characters on screen at a time. I will be dynamically loading spritesheets into the UI based on the actions taken by the user. So they will load as needed.

This game is going to be multiplayer so most of the game logic will live on a server. The UI will largely be there to "play out" what occurred on the server so a lot of communication will occur between client and server in that respect.

Does it look like the level editor will work well for a game like this? Or is it better for more static, self contained games?

Also, does Impact have support for non-square tiled sprite sheets? I just aborted an attempt to do a proof of concept in CraftyJS and one of the limitations it had was it expected all frames on a spritesheet to be square.

Thanks

As an amateur-to-intermediate programmer, I love Impact, and someone with more advanced skills will like it even more. It's not as easy to do things as it was in Flash, but no game engine will be for a long time.

Weltmeister is great for tile-based games. But it is limited to square tiles for now.

You can easily use the spawnEntity function to generate sprites during the game.

As for multiplayer, I don't know much about that, but I think more support is planned in future updates.

The tiles for my game are all for animations or HUD. I'm not doing a tiled background. Is that the limitation you're speaking of in weltermeister?

You don't have to make a tile map. For example it could be a space shooter with only moving entities like spaceships and asteroids, with HUD elements like health at the edges. I think it's pretty flexible.

Ok, sorry I'm not asking this very well.

When you say it only supports square tiles, where does that limitation extend to? Is that just a limitation of tiled backgrounds? Or can entities also only use square-tiled spritesheets? Is the square tile limitation even found outside of the editor?

Only the background maps have to have square tiles. AnimationSheets (typically used to draw entities) and their frames can be of any dimension.

What I don't get: what do you want to use the Level Editor for? The UI?

UIs are not Impact's strong suit. Plain old HTML is great for UIs, but Impact uses the <canvas> element to draw everything - which is great for arcade games, but not so much "UI heavy" games like Poker.

Anyway, buy the engine. If it's not what you need, let me know and I'll give you your money back.

My game won't be anything like poker, I'm not sure in what way poker is UI heavy though.

My game will play more like an arcade game. It will be 2D and will kind of be like a Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana in terms of graphics requirements.

The background will be hand drawn and not tiled. Does that work for the level editor?

@OMATASE - yes it will work. You just slap a background image to the background layer.

If you're thinking multiplayer, your major issue is the slowness of AJAX calls. ImpactJS runs 8 entities @ 60 fps without noticeable slowdown (from my experience). By the time a network call returns, you'll have run through a number of update/draw calls on every scope (main game, per entity, etc). I am interested in a rough graph of entity to fps upper bound.