next »

[johanp]

Hello all!

Pixelizer is a component based game engine in AS3. Drawing inspiration from everything from Flash Punk to Unity I hope to make it really easy to use, but still powerful and extendable.

Current version is 0.4 and these are the current features:

• easy extendable component based framework
• nestable entities for easy manipulation of groups
• lots of premade components and entities
• fast 2D rendering (blitting)
• automated collision detection and response
• spritesheets, animations and tilemaps
• prerendering of movieclips
• automatic panning and volume of moving sounds
• exact mouse and keyboard input
• fancy text rendering
• handy math routines
• effective object pools
• useful logging and debug overlays

Coding with it looks a little like this:

Code:

e = new PxEntity( 40, 80 );
e.addComponent( new PxBlitRenderComponent(  ) );
e.addComponent( new PxAnimationComponent( mySpriteSheet ) );
e.addComponent( new PxBoxColliderComponent( 16, 16 ) );
addEntity( e );

More info, code, docs, and examples can be found on the project page here:
http://johanpeitz.com/pixelizer
Also on github:
https://github.com/johanp/pixelizer

I would be very happy if I could get some feedback on it. Thank you in advance!
/ johan

[Hima]

Saw this in G+ and I'm really interested in this   Coming from Unity, I love the component-based system, since it make things a lot more flexible. I'll give this a try and come back with feedbacks.

[Geti]

Damn, I'll have to have a look at this when I get some free time. We're moving to components in our own engine at the moment and finding that it's a really powerful approach so I'd love to have a look at how you've tackled it in flash.

[Fallsburg]

Looks neat.

Any thoughts on moving away from the blitting and moving towards using the GPU for rendering?

[Richard Kain]

Any thoughts on moving away from the blitting and moving towards using the GPU for rendering?

GPU-supported rendering for Flash isn't quite considered standard yet. It's possible with the latest version of Flash player, but most developers haven't really begun using it extensively.

[Hima]

Seeing that there's a dedicated rendering component for blitting call BlitRenderer, johanp probably thinks of making a rendering component for GPU rendering in the future.

[johanp]

As pointed out, one of the main features of the engine is the extendability. Changing render method should hopefully only require a new render component and a new renderer, which both should be fairly simple to implement. And most importantly, done correctly nothing else would need to be changed.

It's on the todo list, but not very prioritized at the moment.

[st33d]

Weird.

It sort of reminds me of how my engine is set out: https://github.com/st33d/red-rogue/tree/master/src/com/robotacid

Seems to offer all the basics well 

The ability to rasterise DisplayObjects to the rendering system would be very useful for teams with Flash artists.

[johanp]

That's probably a good thing. Both of them.

[johanp]

Bumping to announce version 0.4! Top post updated!

[tametick]

Looking good!

I'm still sticking to HaxeFlixel for the moment due to being more familiar with flixel, it having tons of features (especially with the Flixel Power Tools) & being ported to haxe already, but will be checking pixelizer out for future projects

[DelishusCake]

Speaking of HaXe, is a port planned? This looks like a great framework so far, but I don't work with AS3 anymore.

[tametick]

Speaking of HaXe, is a port planned? This looks like a great framework so far, but I don't work with AS3 anymore.

It's actually pretty easy to port as3 code to haxe yourself, especially with stuff like as3hx

[johanp]

Thanks!

I'm fully aware that people are heavily fortified into either Flixel or Flash Punk. And if that works for you, keep going! I hope to offer Pixelizer as an alternative that works a bit differently in terms of what you can do and how it's done.

I don't know about a HaXe version. Yet. I want to make the engine as good as possible before it starts to get ported. And to know how good it is I have to make a game with it, to expose its strengths and weaknesses. So I'll get on with that then.

[tametick]

Sounds very reasonable- good luck!

I will keep and eye on this one

[Makai]

Oh neat!
I've been keeping an eye open for a component-based game engine for Flash for a while now and was almost starting to thing about rolling my own.

I'll definitely give this a try on my next project.

[johanp]

That's awesome! Let me know how it works out for you!

[Geti]

Gave this a test run with some benchmarking stuff and performance seems snazzy enough, which was really my only concern.
I'll get a small test game going at some point to help find flaws if I can. Once it's all stable enough I might consider porting it to C++ and SDL or something similar as it seems like a really nice clean framework. Good work!

[johanp]

Yay, glad to hear you like it. Cleanliness was one of my design goals. A few more iterations and then I think I'll call it 1.0.

Also, Pixelizer is on github: https://github.com/johanp/pixelizer

[DanFessler]

This is looking quite awesome.  I've been dabbling with the idea of making a component-based game framework with XNA, so this resonates well with me.  What XML map format is it currently supporting?  TilED's TMX?