Getting started with Haxe + OpenFL(and Starling!)

ChrisDS

Hey guys, my name is Chris and I'm the lead software engineer at Dimensionscape LLC. As some of you might have already noticed, our CR Manager, Kayla(under the handle Dimensionscape), has been lurking around the forums here a bit in order to help out with starling developers questions and build some social connections with people familiar with the ecosystem. Despite her best efforts, she is probably not the best go to for haxe support which is why I am extending myself for clarifications. Since there has been such a great interest in Haxe, OpenFL + Starling lately due to the cataclysmic shifts undergoing the AIR platform over at Adobe, we have decided to share our knowledge and experience with you guys since we have recently begun migrating our existing starling projects as well. For those of you that don't know, we're going to be publishing some guides and tutorials originally intended to educate our clients, that focus on the aspects of departing from the AS3+AIR pipeline. These will be available on our website sometime in July for everyone's viewing pleasure.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to patrol these boards like some of my associates, so I won't be able to provide much feedback here. Feel free to ask Kayla some questions about getting started if you have them or email me at Chris@dimensionscape.com for clarification for some 1 on 1 support.

We want to thank everyone here from the bottom of our hearts, including Daniel and Josh, who have made it such a pleasure to work with AIR and Starling over the many years.

Dimensionscape

Hehe, sorry, I'll try my best. The guides will definitely help, especially for beginners and those of you not familiar with the command line.

Michoko

Awesome! Thank you for your generosity.

htmiel

AS3/Flash developer here, completely perplexed about what's happening to AIR now or what might happen in the future.

First of all, thanks to the people at Dimensionscape LLC for offering their support.

For someone who might consider to transition to Haxe/OpenFL/Starling, I would appreciate it if anyone could share some thoughts on a few aspects:

does the Haxe/OpenFL/Starling GPU accelerated performance match or exceed the AS3/AIR/Starling GPU accelerated performance? I use a lot of images permanently moving on the screen, and GPU acceleration is a must for me. I'm already pushing AS3/AIR/Starling to its limits, on high-performance Apple devices.
does Haxe support socket clients/servers, and is there any cryptography support? (RSA, AES, Hash/HMAC, certificate parsing and verification)
does Haxe have any kind of scripting support, to run code on device, at runtime, received over the web as text?

Dimensionscape

htmiel

These are really good questions, let me answer them separately but start off by noting this: You do not need to use starling in haxe to for GPU accelerated performance. I would only recommend using starling in haxe if you are porting an existing AS3 Starling project or for the sake of familiarity.

does the Haxe/OpenFL/Starling GPU accelerated performance match or exceed the AS3/AIR/Starling GPU accelerated performance? I use a lot of images permanently moving on the screen, and GPU acceleration is a must for me. I'm already pushing AS3/AIR/Starling to its limits, on high-performance Apple devices.

Yes, yes yes!!!! Performance is the big winner here. Our apps are as much as 10x faster and we have been able to render more objects at much higher frame rates! Not only that, but keyboard, mouse, touch, and gamepad input is much more responsive.

Does Haxe support socket clients/servers, and is there any cryptography support? (RSA, AES, Hash/HMAC, certificate parsing and verification)

Absolutely!! openfl.net.socket supports client side sockets (and websockets on html5) and familiar libraries like https://github.com/soywiz/haxe-crypto have been ported. Hopefully we can expect some better crypto libraries in the future, but these are way faster because of haxe.

For server sockets and UDP you can use the sys.net.* classes.

does Haxe have any kind of scripting support, to run code on device, at runtime, received over the web as text?

You might feel like giving this a peek:
https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/hscript

We use a custom in-house script engine dubbed DimensionScript for server related applications for now. It has not reached full maturity but we intend to release it publically at some point.

I am glad to see so much interest in haxe. Please feel free to pick our brains.

hugo

@htmiel OMHO, this may be the best (not the optimal) thing that happens to AIR on the last 2 years.
If you see, what really wrecked all this, was simple as a wrong move from the new AIR provider, so it started wrong already.
Now, back to the topic, I have a good felling about Haxe/OpenFl, hope on the FeathersUI for Haxe because is creator is a good developer and I want to thank for CrisDS.
In a near future I will contact you when I'm ready.

I will stick around and curious about the Feathers UI starting project.

mfrasier

Hey Kayla, since Haxe hits the GPU like Starling does, do you still have to handle context loss? If so, is it a similar process?

Also, I keep reading conflicting stories on ANE support. Are all AIR ANEs supported assuming you're just targeting AIR (and not a console or web etc)?

Dimensionscape

mfrasier These are some more technical questions you might want to ask Chris -- especially the one about ANE support for AIR. As far as I know, an earlier version of lime started to add ANE support but I'm not sure what the status on this is. I don't see why you shouldn't be able to use them but I can't say for sure. Our primary focus is to become independent of the AIR SDK and as such we have not embarked on a projects for AIR within haxe at this time (and do not plan to). Here is a comprehensive list of extensions currently available for other haxe targets https://github.com/HaxeExtension

Context loss handling is generally the same, although recent versions of lime and openfl have improved in this area. Unfortunately, context loss is pretty unavoidable in some cases.

Once again, my technical background isn't as strong in this area so please feel free drop Chris a line for any clarification.

htmiel

@Dimensionscape Thank you very much for your answer. I ask these because if Harman does not convince me to stick to their AIR in the next 1-2 months, I will have to choose between:

Unity: probably better for the long run, but I will have to re-learn everything from scratch and rewrite all I already have

and

Haxe: probably the closest alternative to AIR, with a minimal learning curve and the possibility to reuse most of what I already have

I'm currently pausing my AIR developemnt and assesing possible options.

Dimensionscape

htmiel One of the greatest perks in using haxe is its versatility to cross compile into different languages. This means that we can write our front-end and back-end with the same code base which is a really awesome thing to be able to do. It saves us a lot of time and headache. With that said, we also use Unity and other technologies a lot, depending on the customers needs. AIR and Haxe have been indispensable simply because of the easy learning curve that allows our clients to manage their source code independently with little instruction, openly accessible IDE's and licensing agreements that aren't convoluted.

Zantafio

Thank you for offering this little getting started thingy. I think most of us are quite grateful to be assisted while pondering if and how to abandon ship.
Being aware that this here is the Starling forum, I would also like to know, if you Haxers do frequent a more Haxe-centric forum. I sincerely love the Starling community but in the long run I guess it might get too specific to be harassing Chris with emails, or filling up the Starling forum with Haxe / openFl related topics.

After reading through some of the other threads I am mostly concerned with Video support, since in most of my previous work I needed video playback.
I think Chris mentioned WebM. Would be nice to hear more about that.

Another question, i already tried to sneak into the other thread about Haxe was:

I will start developing a mobile application, which will have to use precise ( as in mechanical watch not as in space travel computation ) timers also when the application is running in the background.
In another post about timers someone expressed that this is quite a thing to achieve with Air, especially on iOS
Is there a difference to that in HAXE / OpenFL or does it have to deal with similar restrictions?
In that case developing natively might be the better solution in that special case for now.

Thanks a bundle!

ChrisDS

Zantafio I don't mind too much. Emails allow me to answer at my own discretion without filling up the forums here or getting buried before I have a chance to see them. On the other hand, the people over in the openfl forums are already experienced with the platform and are not particularly fond of starling.

I started this thread because it is centered around using haxe and openfl with starling and to provide support to developers trying to migrate their existing starling projects. We are also working on improving and optimizing the starling framework on haxe and moving our new engine from AIR to Haxe (that is built on top of starling). I have entertained the thought of launching a new forum and I may yet still, but I was worried about detracting from the already dwindling starling community still here(not to mention it would feel kind of strange to keep up with 2 seperate starling related communities).

I would love to talk more about our WebM extension, as its something I've put a lot of work into personally and is nearly ready for production use.

Our focus on making a presence here is to help keep starling alive, despite what happens to AIR.

If we are seen as a nuisance, please let us know your feelings and thoughts; I will understand completely. The last thing we would like to do is encroach where we're not welcome. No problems here. What do you guys think?

TeotiGraphix

ChrisDS If we are seen as a nuisance, please let us know your feelings and thoughts; I will understand completely.

Not at all, this is a community driven by the same questions at the moment. A lot of us really have to figure out where our next years of dev are heading.

Zantafio

Ok. Wow, it was not my intention to criticize your offer by any means. On the contrary. Sorry, if you caught my remark as judging your gracious offer as a nuisance.
However for the sake of future "switchers" and in the general context of forum knowledge exchange, questions answered in forums are a bit more helpful then in private emails.

But of course I do agree that with "modern" forum systems and all the accompaning features such as likes and replies and quotes things can get very cluttered and distracting quite easily. Not to mention all the little personal wars that are sometimes throwing mud over diamonds.
( Gee, I miss that time where people understood you liked their contributions without the need for constant reaffirmation through likes and also understood undertones without emojis... )

Anywho:
I just wanted to know for future reference which forum the haxers are frequenting as to know where to go for all the other embarrassing questions that might pop-up.
( Found some of them on this new thing called google. )

Your concentration on a more Starling-centric HowTo in this forum is greatly appreciated by me, applauded and many thanks are thrown in your general direction.

ChrisDS

Zantafio No worries, I didn't think you were criticizing at all, (though I did get a very unkind email from someone here I don't know..that told me to go back to whatever rock I crawled out from under. Wow.) and I suddenly became painfully aware that this is, after all, an AS3/Starling forum. This is my first time interacting here on any personal level and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't stepping on any toes or rubbing people the wrong way.

pol2095 That is a really good point. Also, I want to congratulate you on some of the really awesome stuff you've put out for AIR. I've been following you for a little while now.

pol2095

For 3D effect, it's necessary in Haxe to use Starling, the Haxe classic display list doesn't support z-axis.
A lot of method in the Haxe documentation doesn't work and it's not mentionned.
Haxe is a good alternative

matulk

pol2095

For 3D effect, it's necessary in Haxe to use Starling, the Haxe classic display list doesn't support z-axis.
h

That is actually a bit misleading. In Haxe there is no display list at all. Haxe is just a programming language. OpenFL has a displaylist, which is a framework which mimics the flash API.

You can do 3D in Haxe without OpenFL + Starling. They are other graphics and game framework for Haxe, like Heaps, Kha, Armory3D just to mention popular ones.

Shaun_Max

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” - Linus Torvalds

Dimensionscape

Shaun_Max If you're referring to our WebM extension, its currently being commissioned by one of our clients that has paid for an exclusive license. Despite that, we are looking into releasing a version of it that is not bound to the agreement and several other extensions as a commercial or open-source option in the near future.

TeotiGraphix

ChrisDS IMHO this discussion should have happened last fall, so anybody telling you to go away must not have a lot at stake.

We are just devs talking all of the possible outcomes, we are actually helping each other's future right now, even if we all go our separate ways eventually.

Zantafio

ChrisDS (though I did get a very unkind email from someone here I don't know..that told me to go back to whatever rock I crawled out from under. Wow.)

Wow ... dire times. Whats wrong with people?

Shaun_Max

Dimensionscape No no, I was just saying, if we keep talking about Haxe & OpenFl nothing is going to come out of it! Like I said, I am eagerly waiting to see some examples, tutorials, demos!