Forums » Impact Engine » Impact 2.0 release date?

I'm okay with no built-in UI stuff because the needs seem to vary per game - some people are okay with re-using DOM elements, some people need in-canvas... and when you bring in issues like internationalization and RTL languages that stuff can get hairy pretty quickly.

What do you mean by "multiplayer support"?

I'd like it if you could associate settings with a level in Weltmeister without using an entity (e.g. what music to play, special effects to use). It'd be nice if Weltmeister could show me a list of entities in the level as well (e.g. where is that darn player spawn point?). Being able to associate information on a per-tile basis would be neat too. That could enable different sounds based on what you're walking on without overloading the entity with that stuff.

JS-wise, all the classes you write having to be exposed as global hurts my engineering soul. It'd be nice to have some unit testing help from the framework, too.

Drhayes: coming from a shop that writes test driven js I couldn't have said your last paragraph any better.

drhayes: the whole engine is client side at the moment. So you can only make single player games.

It would be nice to have multiplayer support (a server backend, which syncronises each client and with a security layer to ensure players can't fiddle with their clients to adversely affect other clients)

I take ImpactJS as Framework, not full-blown game engine.

I see no obvious reason why he should implement multiplayer support directly to the framework.

It is up to US to implement the multiplayer part.

I am extremely pleased with the product i got, this is still, single best HTML5 game framework out there and i it is worth every penny.

And i would happily pay for the second version (even tho 100$ is a large amount of money for me and i've only had this license for few weeks).

Courtesy discount would be nice but definetly not necessary.

@aardivaba exactly, impact is a framework ontop of JS, just like Codeigniter on top of PHP or Rails on top of Ruby. I think that's a huge strength.

There are a lot of requests in this thread that are more a case of 'I don't want to programme this myself, I want Dominic to do it for me' rather than actual framework features.

Should Dominic really be concerned about including advanced HUD features when with a little digging and not too much coding additions to the UI of any game are relatively (!) easy.

R.

Quote from Ardivaba
I take ImpactJS as Framework, not full-blown game engine.

I see no obvious reason why he should implement multiplayer support directly to the framework.

It is up to US to implement the multiplayer part.

+1

Rolling your own multiplayer is difficult though. Id like an Ejecta shim to Game Centre MP :-)

I think Dom should add and work on stuff that inspire him to work on it.
So he wont't burn out and fade away ;-)

A rudimentary multiplayer support out of the box would be awesome thought, but that's hardwork, and the question is if it whould be for Ejecta or for Impact.
And what platforms should it support.

Multiplayer would indeed eat up time.

Oh and by the way Look at this cute bunny!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY-uM56BSrY

Impact is an awesome HTML5 framework, and for me the best one. The only thing I would ask for improvement is its level editor weltmeister. Such things like drhayes said a list of entities that are present in the current level, and also multi-selection of entities. Because modifying the weltmeister is not that easy.

Any news?

Two Years ago it was a september release... Dominic, now hasn't even commented on this for over a year. Am I the only one that is starting to think Impact is no longer being developed? Even large software companies let their customers know some kind of road map. Not a single word in 1+ years and Phazer is looking better by the day.

That's unfortunately right...
Unity2d, phaser etc are going on and Impact looks like still standing.
Also not enough Tutorials and great, successful Games

Sorry for my bad english!

I think he should open source it with a license for "sold" products. Let the community help develop it but still get paid from anyone using it in any real fashion.

Sorry for not responding to this earlier :/

The simple truth is I haven't found the time to work much on Impact 2.0 lately. Ejecta has kept me extremely busy and I have two game projects of my own right now that are close to completion. I'm also still working on Impact 1.x, keep fixing bugs and adding new features (the current dev version for instance has WebAudio support now).

In all honesty, I think I also chickened out a bit, because I know that Impact 2.0 will never be able to please everyone. It's difficult to find a feature set that is worthwhile of the "2.0" name, while still not suffering from feature creep like so many other projects.

Impact is simple and I want to keep it that way. Of course it has some rough edges that I absolutely want to fix. This will require substantial changes to Impact's core and is the main reason why I want a 2.0. The whole PHP requirement is one of those things.

That doesn't mean Impact 2.0 won't have any features. I want to add a lot of stuff that evolved over the years to Impact in a "proper" way. Mobile support from the start, an easy way to build menus and manage layers (like HUDs) better camera controls, lots and lots of small stuff.

All I can say is: please bear with me; I'm working on it!

Dominic Ooh! sad answer!
I love Impact and the features you mention were developed through plugins.
My main problem is the speed of render (For example, even in canvas mode, Pixi.js is extremely fast), I thought were working on it.
I'll keep waiting then or perhaps modifying the Impact core to use Pixi, I like Phaser but I can not forget Impact.

Thanks!

thanks for the info :-)
the simplicity part was certainly a big reason for me to do stuff with impact. More game making, less technical worries

so, hang in there :-)

@Datamosh: yes, a WebGL Renderer, proper WebAudio support from the start and all that behind the scenes stuff is also on the list. Don't worry :)

However I'd be very surprised if Pixi's Canvas mode really is faster than Impact. Not because I don't trust the Pixi developers to write fast code, but because there's not much room for innovation: there's only one way to draw images with Canvas2D.

In contrast, this situation is totally different with WebGL: there's lot's of different ways to do things and optimize them.

"All I can say is: please bear with me; I'm working on it!"

Of course :)

Btw: 'entity component' I have my own implementation at the moment, but I'm sure you can do it better. pretty please!

@dominic: No rush, current version is good enough for most of the time. I am about to finish my first game with ImpactJS and it is coming out great. Thanks for your time and hard work...

However, no concrete answer or date :(
Pity! :'(

Agree with matteray- no need to rush. We know it will be worth the wait :)

For what it's worth, I appreciate the tiny, incremental updates, such as the 1.23 update with the new jump n' run template. Each little update gets me interested again, and I usually update my current game to the latest version.

2 years ago I remember the rumour that 2.0 would have multiplayer built-in, and I kind of waited around for that to happen instead of trying to use the Node plugins other people have developed. That's my fault of course, but a word now and then about some kind of progress keeps me interested in Impact, knowing it's still alive and kicking.

But I still really like how it is structured, and it is quite good as is.

I know this might be a bit of a sore point for a commercial product, but it does really seem like Impact could benefit from an open source model (perhaps with a kickstarter campaign to recoup lost revenue?). I know I would love to contribute myself, and it's obvious that one person is no longer enough to maintain such a large project at a decent pace.

I really enjoy the feature set, performance, and design (for the large part) of Impact, and would really hate to see it go stagnant.

Personally I really like impact the way it is, and I like how its very close to an open source community with the amount of plugins and content that is out there outside of the core framework.

That being said, I know that the forum has slowed a lot in the last few months and competition between other frameworks has grown. When you go to gitub and search for impact, alot of the cooler plugins years old. Granted they work, but there's not as much action going on.

I think it would be cool to do something similar to the older Corona SDK license, before they got so big, where there was a open source and paid version of the framework. This would of coarse need more developers then just dom, but it would also have a larger license price. I'm pretty sure that's how construct was and create.js was similar.

Usually that sort of model ends with an open source version that gets the bare minimum of bug fixes and no new features.

As opposed to the current model that gets the bare minimum of bug fixes and no new features. ;)

Well, now you see why I'm a proponent of the fully open source model ;)

"If you make it open source, will they come?"

The word needs to get out more for the open source community to actually work. The forum always seems dead, not a lot of action going on here. I'm not sure if it went open source that many improvements would happen. I know Dom has added improvements from other people at times.

That said, I made back my license cost already and am very happy with everything I can do with impact so far.

All very well making it open source, why dont you spend the time it takes to write a game framework and make it open source if your such a fan of it?

Meanwhile Dominic can eat and have a roof over his head for sharing and supporting his work.

Quote from paulh
All very well making it open source, why dont you spend the time it takes to write a game framework and make it open source if your such a fan of it?

Meanwhile Dominic can eat and have a roof over his head for sharing and supporting his work.

The point is allowing collaboration to make Impact better. There's certainly a lot that can be done without modifying Impact's core source, Impact++ is a good example, but I believe it would be more beneficial to adopt at least a partial open source model. A good example would be to have the core engine be open source, while certain tools (baking, weltmeister, etc.) be part of a paid license. Or, as I mentioned earlier, a kickstarter/indiegogo campaign, though I'll admit I don't have a clear image of how exactly that would pan out.These are just suggestions - a bump in price to have afford one or two more people to work on the project would also be a potential solution.

Hey there,

a few things to add to that:

@dominic thanks for the update, you have a good core of people who really like Impact, the only thing that could make us move is... the lack of communication, not the fact that you can't solve all the problems in the world :)

I vote for opensource but I can understand the financial related fear. I would say that the OS model would work (free for non commercial projects, maybe a bit higher licence for a standalone dev and a "company" licence with basically a better support).
The key thing here, commercially, is that with a lot of competition doing the same it might be really hard to maintain sells in the future. Whereas having more games promote Impact can help it.

That said, and concerning the evolution of the codebase. Not opensourcing it is your choice. But I don't get why you don't want us to help (as helping helps us and help you and that helps us ^^).
Why don't you setup (or ask for help on that too) something like Gitlab (we use it, it's great, it's basically an open source github) and allow licenced members to do pull requests?
That would be just 100% worth it for everyone.
@vincentpiel has a bit of an awful way (and I say that as a French guy) to put things but he's technically mostly not wrong.
And I presume (might be wrong) that he's more angered not to have a proper way to offer his changes than to have changes to offer. Anyway that's my case :)

To sum it up:
- it's your baby
- it's okay to control and steer it in the direction you think is right
- it's okay to fail
- it's okay not to solve everything
- it's not okay to not let people offer help.

My 2 cents (being quite happy with Impact despite wanting it to move faster) :)