nice, as a haxeflixel user I'm always interested seeing what people are doing with heaps
Free time is nice time.
Nick
@MSGhero
Age 31, Male
Somewhere in the North
Joined on 12/15/10
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I’ll have some cool pics soon enough and maybe a demo
@MSGhero or Neo himself
I didn’t realize we were in the presence of The One
"Or having breaking changes pushed to dev because Shiro Games codes differently than you." - it's true with any kind of library/engine. The only problem I have with heaps is that it's part of the haxe+hashlink+heaps ecosystem.
I love haxe, but everything relies on Shiro games to not fuck it up. I'm not saying they're not doing a good job (especially when they share their tools with us for FREE), but they're too widespread. They have to maintain haxe (the language), hashlink (the VM), and heaps (the library).
About a year ago, when I tried using other game libraries after a rather recent haxe language update, I couldn't even get a "hello world" program to compile, and had to downgrade to an earlier version of haxe (though this is a library issue and not Shiro Games fault). I smacked my head against the wall for days trying to get hashlink to debug my projects before getting linked to a thread on github saying that hashlink debugging flat-out doesn't work on Linux (I'm a user of both Win and Linux). And the documentation of heaps is not the greatest with either almost non-existing docs or everything being in technical jargon (the later part is my own fault for not knowing enough, I guess).
This seems like me venting, but with other languages/libraries/etc I had less struggles because most of the time stuff didn't work because of me and my lack of understanding, and nothing else. If you take a popular language like C# or Java - the languages and runtime environments themselves have separate dedicated teams working on them and they are really mature and robust languages/systems. And when people make libraries for said languages, they only need to maintain their own project. With heaps - they have to not only maintain the library, but the language, and the environment that it is supposed to run in.
I'm currently using heaps and debugging via the javascript debugger, but it's such a pain compared to how uncluttered the hashlink debugging sessions are. But I can't make it work on Linux where I usually do most of my programming. And of course, I can't use any sys libraries, because I'm stuck with JS for debugging.
I can't be mad at them. I think haxe is great. But I am really desperate for everything to just work, you know?
Yeah HL on Heaps is like exponential "one guy holding up the entire tech stack for free." Besides those breaking pushes, I have seen a lot of discussion about future changes in the discord, like others bringing new targets in like mobile and the new Macs and whatnot. But that's why I use the stable releases. There was a time a few years ago when I couldn't compile on the latest release Haxe because I used a basic feature that got broken.
@DiskCrash Not to downplay your concerns, since they are valid, but I wanted to mention that there is indeed a separate organization working on/maintaining the language - the Haxe Foundation (https://haxe.org/foundation/). And while the language creator (and head of Shiro) is in the foundation, the main maintainers for the language work at the foundation full-time (as far as I'm aware)
Making me sign in to my NG account just to chat, but I was curious if you had any follow up to how the Jam went? I've been thinking of tinkering with Heaps to get a distance from Flixel's way of doing things (namely wanting to get back into an ECS sort of vibe I had going with libGDX back in the day). I just recently installed Heaps/HL/Aidan'sECS to give things a try myself by remaking and finishing a jam game to try to learn it all. Was just curious if you had any take-aways with your experience.
I didn't join unfortunately. I had some real life stuff come up, nothing bad but it took away my free time. In general though, I am really enjoying the ecosystem. I just added local multiplayer support in a project, and it really wasn't that much effort since the ECS kinda already sets you up for that.
I do think I would have struggled in the jam if I chose a different genre of game than my current main project. That may just be me, because I tend to spend a good bit of time thinking before I'll create a new system, component, or resource. However, I also think a jam is a good opportunity to get that experience by making a SMALL project. If I had the time, I would have still participated.
ORHX
F*ck it, i program in machine languaje
MSGhero
You're either dumb as hell or a god. Maybe both. (I'm kidding)