Marimo: Interactive Fluffy Ball

I thought this was a three.js demo but it's actually built with a language called haxe [1]. I've never heard of this language before and looks really cool. Makes me want to play with it!

[1] https://haxe.org/

razemio• 2 years ago

I developed a lot with haxe and openfl back in the day when flash got killed. I wrote my bachelor thesis about an automated converter from as3 to haxe. It was a blast. Ported several projects within hours instead of weeks to native webOS, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, OSX and Html5. Highly recommend. It is fun language especially for native game development. Issues I had where the "final steps". Like on screen keyboards , different aspect ratios of devices (especially android), performance issues which where not the fault of haxe but incredibly bad designs in several projects I ported and several other things one wouldn't think about. It is NOT plug and play with haxe but you have the freedom todo whatever you want.

Also shout-out to the maintainer of openfl and several other projects. I think he was called Joshua (still remember the name even I haven't touch haxe in over 10 years). Without this guy, haxe would be half the fun.

sriram_malhar• 2 years ago

It is remarkable that haxe has been chugging along for 19+ years now. Every time I am drawn back to it (as now), I feel it has all the fun and solid features I want (cross-platform, algebraic data types, low syntactic noise). And I feel guilty that I am not paying attention to it because "it is not popular". That changes today!

Joel_Mckay• 2 years ago

haxe has been around for awhile, and was more popular prior to Unity 3D and 3rd party App store deployment viability.

Porting for cross-platform deployment is such a pain, that many people just don't bother anymore. Have a look at Steam titles, Unreal Engine and xbox developer programs. Some of these paths do streamlined content deployment well... And usually it is not going to cost you anything until you hit $1m revenue (UE has remained popular for good reasons).

Start small, fail quickly, and document a deployment pipeline that works for your use-cases. Also, study pre-baked lighting and texture techniques like a monk if you want high fps later. Most avoid particle cloud VFX, hair physics, and complex water surfaces. Complex physics like liquids are usually faked with baked procedural textures, lighting caustics, and or meshes from a liquid/fire/explosion sim or VDB.

I'm not suggesting I know what I'm talking about, but recommend having a look at what other people used on gamedev.tv . We are not affiliated with their group, but in my humble opinion the courses by Grant Abbitt have helped the Asset artists a great deal with basic low-poly design workflows. Blender is still terrible, but have a look at "Auto-Rig Pro" UE export tutorials (limb volumetric preservation with secondary deforms), "Draw Xray" and "Tesselator" for quadrilateral re-meshing. =)

Some Assets benefit from post-processing with free Windows programs like xNormal for baking, and Instant Meshes for auto field-aligned topo meshes.

Finally, avoid anything AI related until the global copyright laws reach a consensus opinion of ownership. i.e. it could end up poisoning your project with a submarine copyright violation.

Hope your team builds something awesome and fun, =)

Solvency• 2 years ago

What's the gotcha here for why it isn't better known? I've used Processing, Unity, Godot, hell I even played with Ember C++.

Never heard of this til now. Any major drawbacks or limitations?

liveoneggs2• 2 years ago

Papers Please (The game) was written in haxe

wavemode• 2 years ago

When I was using it (a long time ago) I considered it pretty solid, as far as game development goes (though you're not going to find a ton of libraries outside of that niche).

The only thing I remember disliking was that, it has a lot of backends (it can compile to Python, PHP, Lua, Java... lots of things) and some of them are well-maintained whereas some are barely used and rather buggy.

abrookewood• 2 years ago

I keep my eye on it, but have never used it. It is pretty amazing though: "Haxe can build cross-platform applications targeting JavaScript, C++, C#, Java, JVM, Python, Lua, PHP, Flash, and allows access to each platform's native capabilities.".

cainxinth• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koosh_ball

marginalia_nu• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem

Razengan• 2 years ago

These kinds of toys will be pretty fun in an AR space, once lightweight glasses and haptic feedback becomes commonplace :)

rurban• 2 years ago

So it's not the jupyterlabs replacement, with much better interactive widgets

Marimo: Interactive Fluffy Ball

Related Stories