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Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Impact. Congrats to the Rocketpack guys in Finland! I met them over a beer a few month ago - they definitely deserve all the suc

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Impact. Congrats to the Rocketpack guys in Finland! I met them over a beer a few month ago - they definitely deserve all the success they're having. Maybe I should have accepted their Job offer back then, but I had (and still have) way too much fun with Impact :) My understanding is that RocketEngine is a complete IDE to develop games - so you write your code directly in the browser. I haven't personally seen it in action though. For Impact you write your code with whatever editor or IDE you want. It's just a bunch of JS files. Impact also features a tile based level editor that runs in the browser and (surprise) generates level data in JSON format. Impact is somewhat more targeted at arcade games and not so much at FarmVille-like stuff. It also uses the HTML5 <canvas> element to draw everything, instead of moving around a bunch of DIVs - and while I believe that canvas is the "right way" to do it, it means that it doesn't run in IE prior to version 9. Impact also has a growing community who creates plugins for all kinds of stuff: Pathfinding, Tweening, Physics, WebSockets, etc. You can see some of that in the forums: http://impactjs.com/forums/code http://impactjs.com/forums/code

dpcan 16y ago
Will Impact work in Android? And will it be able to play sounds and music soon? These are the only 2 reasons I haven't purchased yet, but it looks great.
- phoboslab 16y ago
  It works on Android, yes. However, sound is not supported on iOS or Android devices yet. The <audio> implementation on those platforms is unbelievably broken and there's not much I can do about it other than wait for Apple and Google to fix it. This blog post does a good job at mentioning the problems with sound on iOS and how to work around a few of them. Android has basically the same problems: http://remysharp.com/2010/12/23/audio-sprites/ http://remysharp.com/2010/12/23/audio-sprites/ Still, even with all those workarounds, you have a lot of lag (>0.5s) before a sound plays and you can only play one sound at a time. That's hardly suited for games :/
  - dpcan 16y ago
    I had trouble with the multi-touch on my android, so the demo game didn't really work, but it does seem to work, yes, sorry about that. I see what you mean about sounds. I just went and tried some of the HTML 5 games I like on my iPhone and just realized they too didn't have sounds. I'm thinking that if I create a native Android app and wrap the HTML 5 game into a browser, then I may be able to use SoundPool to play some sounds if the game and the app can communicate. We'll see, may be purchasing today :)
lux 16y ago
Wow, thanks for the details! I'm definitely going to have to grab a copy and take some time to try out Impact, it looks like a ton of fun. It's pretty clear we're going to start seeing a lot of real games coming out in HTML + JS soon. As for canvas, the way browsers are competing on improving speed these days I don't think slow rendering is something we'll have to worry about for much longer, and with IE9 almost out it will be possible to drop support older IE versions soon enough too. Fun times to come!

dpcan 16y ago

Will Impact work in Android? And will it be able to play sounds and music soon? These are the only 2 reasons I haven't purchased yet, but it looks great.

phoboslab 16y ago
It works on Android, yes. However, sound is not supported on iOS or Android devices yet. The <audio> implementation on those platforms is unbelievably broken and there's not much I can do about it other than wait for Apple and Google to fix it. This blog post does a good job at mentioning the problems with sound on iOS and how to work around a few of them. Android has basically the same problems: http://remysharp.com/2010/12/23/audio-sprites/ http://remysharp.com/2010/12/23/audio-sprites/ Still, even with all those workarounds, you have a lot of lag (>0.5s) before a sound plays and you can only play one sound at a time. That's hardly suited for games :/
- dpcan 16y ago
  I had trouble with the multi-touch on my android, so the demo game didn't really work, but it does seem to work, yes, sorry about that. I see what you mean about sounds. I just went and tried some of the HTML 5 games I like on my iPhone and just realized they too didn't have sounds. I'm thinking that if I create a native Android app and wrap the HTML 5 game into a browser, then I may be able to use SoundPool to play some sounds if the game and the app can communicate. We'll see, may be purchasing today :)

lux 16y ago

Wow, thanks for the details! I'm definitely going to have to grab a copy and take some time to try out Impact, it looks like a ton of fun. It's pretty clear we're going to start seeing a lot of real games coming out in HTML + JS soon. As for canvas, the way browsers are competing on improving speed these days I don't think slow rendering is something we'll have to worry about for much longer, and with IE9 almost out it will be possible to drop support older IE versions soon enough too. Fun times to come!