Well it’s that time again, it’s been just about three weeks since the first iteration of the Flax HTML5 Game Engine 0.1 and as promised we have tried really hard to stick to our time-boxed release system and putting the Agile practices that we learned about in software engineering on our college course at IT Carlow into practice.

Unfortunately for version 0.2 we haven’t got as many features in as hoped, as these days we are exhausted from our daily work at Ericsson and the administration of the site and meetings etc, but nevertheless. We have got some nice little visual features and quite a large amount of under the hood changes. Check out the changelog below to see the main things that changed.

Here is a link to the live demo of the Flax HTML5 Game Engine 0.2 Live Demo, running its editor Weave. Still currently no actual game, though we want to make it easy to make games, so first we must build the tools. If you didn’t see Carl’s last post about Flax HTML5 Game Engine 0.1 Live Demo you should check it out.

Performance

Many people who don’t have hardware acceleration yet complained that for version 0.1 CPU was at 100%. We have tried to reduce that this iteration and in some case we have seen a cut by 40%, but not in all browser/operating systems. We have tested the performance on many systems, both hardware accelerated and non-accelerated, with many different browsers, on various operating systems. The performance is somewhat spotty. For example on Windows in Chrome with hardware acceleration CPU is 19% and GPU 17%. Whereas on Carl’s MacBook Pro we are getting 80% CPU and small drops in frames on a system that is meant to be accelerated. On my Linux machine, with no hardware acceleration, in Chrome we see a drop of 40% CPU from version 0.1. Though there are many large optimisations in the pipeline which we will hopefully see come to life in version 0.3 which I believe could knock off another 20% CPU for non-hardware accelerated systems.

Video

Iterations

Change Log

Controllable animated sprites with smooth camera panning

Tile region

Support for extremely large map size

Rendering optimisations, though more to follow.

Up to 40% CPU reduction on some systems.

Increased responsiveness when tiling in the editor

Local Storage support, to save maps.

Auto save local storage

Map file compression (we tested, it brought a map from 1.6MB to 45KB)

Internet Explorer 9 support

Overlay FPS counter

UI bugfixes Main menu items taking focus fixed Export text clears Editor doesn’t show up by default on mobile devices and resolutions smaller than 1024*768



Next Iteration Goals

So what’s in store for version 0.3 which again will be based around a 3 week time-boxed iteration. Well hopefully we will get to see a few of the following features in 0.3

Some cool Box2D Physics

Audio

More optimisation in CPU usage

Focus on proper mobile device support

There are more features which I hope we can get in for 0.3 but that’s all I will say for now.

As last time, we’re using the Pokémon Gold and Silver tilesheet. Our own tiles weren’t finished in time, but as soon as they are, we’ll replace these. We know, and we’re sorry.

Last minute bug time!

We’ve noticed that Flax doesn’t work in Firefox until you click on a UI element – just do something like click the About menu and it should work. Sorry about that!