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Comment by simplify | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, how do you plan to differentiate from impactjs (http://impactjs.com/)? It also has a map editor quite similar to the one you're showing off.

I just used impact for a client project recently, and it is phenomenally easy to work with. The developer license is well worth the cost.

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The biggest difference between Impact and Flax is that Flax is written with the Java language, using GWT to cross-compile into Javascript. We used GWT because a year ago, when we started, neither of us really knew Javascript. As well as that, we like our strongly-typed languages, and we figured there might be more game developers who know Java than js (though that's totally unfounded, and pretty much just plain wrong. ;) )

The fact that GWT compiles into super-optimised js (though that's hard to tell, what with the 100% CPU usage) is nice, too.

Impact is very cool indeed. I seem to remember speaking to the dev behind Impact just after we announced Flax - I guess he got there before we did. :)

Since the games themselves are written in Java, could you potentially make another implementation of Flax that runs directly on JVMs (e.g., directly on Android without using the browser)? Or it it tied to closely to GWT to do that reasonably?

Potentially, we could do so, yes. It would take some time, though, because the engine is centred heavily on creating map object from a JSON string, which probably wouldn't work so nicely out of the box in a simple JVM (though to be honest I haven't looked into it).

I just brought that up because I found that to be a drawback of ImpactJS[1] when I tried out some of the demos—they didn't run well on Android. By allowing the user to compile into both JavaScript and JVM versions, you could avoid that issue.

[1] http://impactjs.com/

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