New Year, New OpenFL

It may seem like an awkward time to talk about the new year, “It’s nearly spring!”, you might say. You are right! We have been quite busy, and although the blog has remained silent, we assure you that the wait has been worth it.

EVERYTHING IS OPEN-SOURCE

I know, you think this is clear already. Mostly. Everything now is open-source. OpenFL has “open” in its name for a reason. We believe that OpenFL is a passport, enabling you to take your content, and with it, your creative vision, to the world. OpenFL is about opening doors and creating opportunity. That is why we have exciting news:

We have opened everything.

The website you are on is open-source. The project is open-source. The workflow and roadmap are open. The documentation (wiki) is open-source. Our contributors chat room, the libraries and supporting tools are open.

The SWF library, in-app purchase and GameCenter support are now open, but most importantly, we want to work with you to make OpenFL incredible, even more incredible than it is now. Together, let’s build something extraordinary, let’s open more doors, let’s take our content to the world.

When we created OpenFL, it was a promise to create something that democratized the development workflow. We believe in carrying the vision forward, but together, we can do so much more. Together, we can build the best platform, with an extremely high level of quality.

Today, OpenFL targets TVs, mobile devices, laptops, desktops, and as we learned this week at Mobile Web Congress, smartwatches. OpenFL runs on embedded systems, consoles, browsers, runtimes and low-level assembly code.

Stencyl 3 launched this week, running on OpenFL. Stencyl features over 200,000 users. HaxeFlixel, HaxePunk and numerous other frameworks run on OpenFL. Exciting, forthcoming 3D engines, some public (like foo3D and BabylonHx) and some which are yet to be announced, are powered by the same technology. Even retail products are coming that are running OpenFL to power the user experience.

If you previously purchased one of the extensions, and feel wronged now that the extensions are open-source, please contact us directly so we can help you. We really appreciate your help in making OpenFL and these libraries better.

OpenFL is a community effort, so if you have improvements, please make pull requests, we are glad to accept them! If there are ways we can make it easier for you to contribute, or answer questions about the codebase, please let us know.

There is also a new way that you can help support OpenFL, by contributing on our Patreon page: http://www.patreon.com/openfl. With any size investment, small or large, you can help ensure that OpenFL remains free and continues to have focused support.

We are excited for the future, are you? Let’s build a better tomorrow!