Forums » Impact Engine » Evaluating Impact, Can impact do following?

First of all, I have only seen positive reviews above Impact.
From video tutorial I realize that it has nice Level editor/ sprite support / physics etc.

I have following question in mind
1. Is it possible to create a level without level editor? does Impact has proper docs for it?

2. Can we have entities without Image/animation (using draw function)?
2.1 Possible to create water like entity (like where is my water? )
2.2 Possible to create lots of small objects (like Tilt to Live) ?

3. For performance, Can we add physics to level border only using only one physics box (rather than creating walls and small physics objects in level editor?)

4. Does Impact physics advance enough? or does it support external Box2D library (e.g. http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/) ?

5. Does impact has advance game-menu support? or it should be created as normal JS app?

Any pointers / questions / suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Nachiket

1. Yes. I've written an AppEngine application that dynamically generated ImpactJS-compatible levels. As far as the docs for it... Check out http://impactjs.com/documentation/class-reference/game#loadlevel.

2. Yes. The draw function is optional for all entities. If you do implement it, you don't have to use an AnimationSheet to draw anything. Impact gives you access to the canvas' context directly.
2.1. I'd imagine so, but I'd be interested in what effects you want the water to have... A big entity would provide you with collisions, sure, but maybe you want to set the gravityFactor for your player entity instead? Depends on what you're trying to do.
2.2 Yes. You could mean either particle generation: http://www.pointofimpactjs.com/snippets/view/24/particle-effects-generation

Or bullet hell: http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/ Nothing in ImpactJS prevents you from doing bullet hell, but I'd bet you'd bump into performance limits of HTML Canvas. Nothing ImpactJS could do to help you there, but you might check out WebGL and the efforts to expose a canvas context-like API there.

3. I'm sorry, I don't understand your question.

4. ImpactJS supports box2d: http://impactjs.com/documentation/physics-with-box2d It's built-in physics mostly supports AABB collisions and gravity.

5. No. You have a couple of options here: create in-canvas GUI elements or re-use the DOM to present buttons.

It's worth giving the documentation a solid read-through. It's pretty informative, and Dominic tends to be upfront about any limitations.

Hi drhayes,
Thanks for your response, much appreciated.


@2.2 i guess, particle demo doesn't make sense, as each dot / bullet will have its physics and collision, but z-type is nice, and I played ipad version (shooting one) really nice.

@performance limits, I am aware about it and experienced in canvas.
And I am strictly looking for iphone/ipad only,
I hope using Ejecta with Impact will increase performance and limitations.

@3, nevermind, Box2D sample addresses it.

@5, I guess, demos must have some reference implementation.

I guess, I am going to buy it soon :)

Thanks,
Nachiket

You really should. The framework is very flexible, Dominic is very responsive, and the community on the forums is supportive and responsive.

I'm just trying to follow in their footsteps. ( =

I'd agree with the others. The forums are great - everything I've asked has been answered fairly quickly. Impact is really nice, and the performance is great. I am building a game right now where I've never even opened Weltmeister - not once. So yes it's certainly possible to make games/levels without the level editor. It was just wrong for the game I'm building, plus I never got it to work with it's php backend as we're a MS shop here and I don't control what the server supports.