List of JavaScript Game Engines | Hacker News Reader

List of JavaScript Game Engines

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110 pointskilian24 comments

There's something totally awesome about seeing your project on this kind of thing. Almost feels like being published.

<plug> I'm delighted to see Flax on the list there, it being my own project. </plug>

Edit: removed two extraneous instances of the word "something"

Would you say that the list correctly characterized Flax as being geared towards MacOS X & Linux?

My reading of your "about" page, which the list cites for that characterization, sounds more like the 1st paragraph mentioned those platforms as topics one might also see on the blog, but didn't really say anything that married Flax itself to those platforms.

No, I wouldn't. Flax uses <canvas> when it's available, and a fallback for when it's not, so it more or less works on a decent number of browsers, platform independent.

It takes a lot for me to recommend a product, but having played with ImpactJS (on the list) I can't recommend it enough.

Although it's commercial, $99 is cheap and it was great fun to tinker with over the Christmas holiday (I like paying for software, then I don't feel guilty if I have a question to two). The integrated level designer really made it more approachable for somebody just starting to think about HTML5 games.

I have to agree. I bought it after the new year and am having a great time with it. I think the documentation is great and the author seems very committed to doing a fine job and perhaps more importantly continuing with his project.

Is it able to do isometric view and pathfinding ?

I'm not an expert with it - I'm in the tinkering phase only :-)

Having said that, based on what I saw on the forums it doesn't support isometric out of the box but you can create your own tile type and then work with isometric tiles (I can't speak for the creator, but the question has come up enough that I would hope he's looking at adding native support!).

The Isogenic Engine (http://www.isogenicengine.com/home/) on the list looks quite good for Isometric games but I haven't used it - would love to hear how people have found that library.

I'm not sure about path finding. I've been building basic platform style games where units go backwards and forwards typically.

For starting out with simple platform games though it's quite nice.

As far as I can tell, isogenicengine is not published. There's a beta signup, that's about it.

My list (no reddit account so I'll post here)

https://gist.github.com/749734

I hate to say it, but javascript games will not be viable until browsers are willing to relinquish keyboard controls to user code. We need two things, ability to enter full screen, and ability to take all controls, in a way that still protects the end user.

Mozilla has proposed a FullScreen API. It's also in the latest Webkit nightlies iirc.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:FullScreenAPI

You can also prevent the default behavior for almost all keys already (Opera is still a bit reluctant in that regard).

Firefox also doesn't like giving exclusive arrow key controls or blocking find as you type.

Isn't the whole point of HTML5 games is that they don't take the whole focus of the computer? Otherwise you may as well play a normal game.

that hasn't stopped flash games from being wildly successful.

flash is able to go fullscreen as well as request control of user input.

https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki/List-of-JS-Game-Engine...

direct link to the now "official" github wiki page.

Very nice list. I've googled a while ago for this, and it yielded awfull results. Not that search engines were ever good at specific option comparison (think wikipedia lists), but it really got worse as more nad more people create things.

HN also had a very nice list a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024401

Hehe, that's my post too! I was trying to make people to contribute info!

Some of them are so slow. Waiting for better javascript performance optimization.

I think Javascript performance is basically here but mostly unused, destroyed by careless abstraction.

Yes, and the problem is not JavaScript performance per se. The problem is slowness in the canvas implementation in several browsers.

In my game 90%+ is spend drawing to canvas.

In some cases its better to use the DOM to render the game, especially if the platform has accelerated CSS3 transform and translate3d (like iOS).

What I did was to abstract the drawing so the game can render either to canvas or DOM depending on what is faster for the platform the code runs on.

full ack. The only way I can speed up my games is by doing less canvas calls, everything else is negligible. Although I A* often runs and a couple dozen simple state machine AIs for the actors.

We've got the engines but where are the games?

I guess like most of those projects, GameJs grew as a library while I was coding games.

Still, I have only managed to finish small games and the biggest - roguelike RTS - is still in the making http://gamejs.org/apps/rtsimple/ (rough tech demo)

If you do game programming as a hobby, then the only predictable way to finish a game is during a competition. It is much easier to finish a game within 48 hours than with unlimited time.

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