Tag Archives: citrus engine

Alef is out!

Hey there,

It has been a long time since I wrote my first game, Kinessia, with the Citrus Engine (and start contributing), one and a half year. Less than one year ago, I made an other one, Tribus, using a Citrus Engine’s port in Objective-C. That was my first project in Objective-C so the source code of the port shall not be very clean, that’s why I’ve never released it officially.

We all know the problem making a framework / library and never use in real context project. That’s why I started my carreer as a freelancer 4 months ago, to be able to make applications / games for companies and show what can be done with the Citrus Engine. And now I’m proud to add a new reference to the engine: Alef.

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An entity/component system’s attempt using Box2D

One year ago, I heard about the Entity/Component Model for the first time. It seemed to be awesome for game design / development. This is 3 links/resources for a good introduction : Gamasutra the Entity Component Model, Entity Systems are the future of MMOG development, Entity Systems. Then Richard Lord has made a very good blog post with code example using his own framework : Ash. And finally, Shaun Smith’s experience using Ash.

All the code example is available on the new Citrus Engine’s GitHub repository. Compile the src/entity/Main.as

During this year, entity/component system has always been something I wanted to try… but that was scary : this is not OOP, that’s a new way of programming. I wanted to add this system to the Citrus Engine as an option to handle complex object. For basic object OOP is great and easy to set up, but for complex game object which may have new abilities on the fly, you’ve quickly a Class with 700 lines of code and conditions. Not easy to maintain some weeks later. The Citrus Engine handles physics engine (Box2D & Nape) & a simple math-based collision-detection system. However it comes built-in with a “platformer” starter-kit based on Box2D, so I made my entity/component system’s experiments using Box2D. And that was not simple.

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The Citrus Engine goes on Haxe NME, welcome to the CitruxEngine

One month ago I started to work on the CitruxEngine. I was very confident with Haxe performance on mobile and NME cross platform opportunities. And now, I can say those are awesome!

In April 14-15th, I was in Paris to assist to the Haxe conf 2012. It was really cool, Silex Labs has made a good job! Conferences were very interested and the community greatly friendly. And I had the opportunity to make a lightning talk concerning my contribution to the Citrus Engine 2D game framework and its port on Haxe NME. The presentation was a bit from scratch, but that was a good experience! I’m very happy to be the first to start the lightning talk, since there were very serious projects 😀

CitruxEngine Github.
CitruxEngine Demo. Simple demo which have been tested on Flash & CPP (using left/right key and spacebar) and iOS (touch & accelerometer). There are sound, animations (idle, walk and jump) and physics.
The port is currently not finished!

I will not present some code here. If you are already familiar with the Citrus Engine, there will be no problem. Take a look on the example on Github.

HTML5
When I started the port, I would the CitruxEngine be as cross platform as possible. HTML5 is promising, and Niel Drummond the man behind Jeash has made an incredible job! However I found that the Haxe NME Box2D port has not very good performance with HTML5. So I’ve dropped the HTML5 target at the moment, but I keep an eye on Jeash!

Box2D
Thanks to Haxe NME, Box2D runs very well on mobile! This is mostly the reason why I’ve started the CitruxEngine. The Citrus Engine uses the AS3 Alchemy version of Box2D which has some differences with the original. It seems there is a bug with the Haxe NME Box2D port : the beginContact & endContact listeners are fired all the time if a dynamic body is on a static body (like a hero on a platform), whereas it fires only once if there are 2 dynamics bodies. This behavior is blocking me.

SpriteSheets
I made my test with the spritesheet haxelib which uses SpriteLoq. At the moment it works well. I’ve not made serious test with animations.

Level Editor
I love how the Citrus Engine handles Flash Pro as a Level Editor. I would like the Haxe NME version handles it as well. But at the moment we can’t read AS3 code in a SWF file (it is the way that class and properties are defined), so I need to think to an external way. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the Level Architect!

Console
The console is really a cool feature of the Citrus Engine, it will be available in the CitruxEngine too. I’ve started to implement it, but it’s not ready yet.

I will continue to work on the CitruxEngine, but now I’ve to focus on my school project using Objective-C, it’s really hard to get back when you have tested Haxe power ! In less than two months I will be graduate and looking for a job, future is exciting.

Thanks to postite & elsassph for their help!

Create objects and Art in the Citrus Engine

Update : if you want a version with a SWC for targeting iOS, please refers to this post.

Hey ! I started to make my school game project this week. I advance quickly, it should be fine for the end of june !

For this third tutorial on the Citrus Engine, I explain better how you can use the Flash IDE as Level Editor, and I show two classes that I’ve created for my game. Here is what you will have.

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Create a breakout game with the Citrus Engine

Today this is a new tutorial on the great Citrus Engine framework. Before starting my school project, I wanted to try using box2D inside the Citrus Engine, so I will show you how create a breakout game !

Click here to play the game, don’t forget to click in the swf to enable keyboard.

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