Forums » Impact Engine » To where is Impact headed?

Quote from Codestar
@Joncom https://twitter.com/phoboslab/status/560848738386997248

It's nice to tweet to your competition, but I think that it's not quite OK to ignore the questions, even begs, from your most faithful/loyal users.

I think that Dominic really needs a community manager for the forums.

Personally I don't think it's troubling to have no periodic updates, I personally prefer that to the constant barrage of inconsequential updates by other providers, but it certainly makes the forums look like they are on life support.

Quote from FelipeBudinich
I think that Dominic really needs a community manager for the forums.

What would such a person do exactly?

Quote from Joncom
What would such a person do exactly?

Basically what you already do plus be able to move, edit, close and delete posts, IMHO.

With the finalisation of es2015, it'd be great to be able to write impact
modules using es2015. There are a few advantages to it.

import Entity from '../../impact/entity';

class Player extends Entity {
  constructor(x, y, settings) {
    super(x, y, settings);
    this.something = true;
  }
}

export default Player;

If we used a bundler, like rollup, our game's source code
would only contain the pieces of code being used and nothing extra. On top of that, we could also potentially use any npm module easily.

import Entity from '../../impact/entity';
import axios from 'axios';

class Player extends Entity {
  // ...
  // This is a bad example, but that is okay
  kill() {
    axios.post('/post/score/to/some/database', {
      score: this.score,
      name: this.name
    })
    .then(doSomething)
    .catch(errorHandler);
    super.kill();
  }
  // ...
}

It's also future proof, as any modules we write, we could also import into other
projects quite easily.

My second wish for Impact is the use of a WebGL renderer such as PIXI.js. I
think that the performance of Impact would be greatly increased if we moved away
from the Canvas2D API.

All that being said, I still like the engine, and there's good reason that it is
still #2 on https://html5gameengine.com. The community is still active and
helpful and contrary to popular belief, Dominic is still around - though AFAIK he
is working pretty exclusively on Ejecta.

@Firegael some good ideas there.

What's amazing is that Dominic's code already looks and works like es2015 classes.

When it came out 5 years ago it was cutting edge and wasn't always working in all browsers.

The advantage it has now is that it will work without transpiling from es2015, but I like how you have shown what it might look like. And the integration with npm modules would be great.

What's more likely than porting to es2015 is some kind of support for WebGL. We'll have to wait and see.