HaxeFlixel

HaxeFlixel 4.4.0

May 4, 2018

HaxeFlixel 4.4.0 is now available on Haxelib, adding support for OpenFL 8 and Lime 6.3.0! Breaking changes are mostly limited to blend modes and a slightly different shader syntax. Additionally, 4.4.0 is still fully-backwards-compatible with OpenFL 3.6.1 legacy or next, so even if you don't plan on upgrading to OpenFL 8 just yet, don't let that stop you from taking advantage of the other fixes and improvements in the 4.4.0 release.

OpenFL ~~5~~ ~~6~~ ~~7~~ 8 support has been long-awaited. OpenFL 3.6.1 is still working fine for many people, so why be excited about this? Well, there's many reasons:

  • HTML5 support in OpenFL 8 is vastly improved. WebGL is now the default renderer, which also means - GLSL shaders by default:



    Check out the demos page, we've updated all of them with OpenFL 8 builds so you can see the improvements in action.

  • We can now take advantage of all the fixes and improvements that happened between OpenFL 3.6.1 and OpenFL 8 - this has already meant that tens of old issues could be closed across the issue trackers of Flixel repositories.

  • OpenFL 3.6.1 will eventually stop working with latest Haxe - there's already some minor compiler errors with the latest Haxe development branch. A similar issue exists in the Android world, with Ant being switched out for Gradle as the build tool. Latest HXCPP was also causing some trouble.

  • Latest OpenFL enables HaxeFlixel to use the HashLink target in the future, once support for it is implemented in Lime. If you haven't heard about HashLink, it's a new Haxe target and VM that's Neko's spiritual successor, but much faster. It has amazing features such as source-level debugging and native C compilation.

Since these reasons have surely managed to excite you as much as us, what else do you need to know about OpenFL 8? Here's a few things:

  • The Neko target will be considerably slower in OpenFL 8. This is because more of OpenFL is written in Haxe now, whereas there was a large native / C++ component in 3.6.1 / legacy. Until HashLink support becomes a reality, you may want to consider retiring Neko as your "fast-to-compile"- / default test target in favor of HTML5. With WebGL, it is now very close to HXCPP builds when it comes to rendering.
  • There are some known remaining issues that will be worked out in future OpenFL and Flixel releases. If you find any more, please let us know!
  • OpenFL 8 and HaxeFlixel 4.4.0 is best used with Visual Studio Code and the Lime extension. We have a comprehensive guide to help you with setting it up and how you can debug the HTML5 and Flash targets.
  • The easiest way to update is to run haxelib upgrade. Alternatively, you can run haxelib update manually on the different libraries.

Finally, a huge thanks goes to Joshua Granick, the maintainer of OpenFL. He invested a lot of time to make sure that this transition can happen smoothly. The fairly short diff of the pull request on the Flixel end of things doesn't begin to do all the behind-the-scenes improvements and bugfixes that happened in OpenFL and Lime justice!

That's all for now. If you have any more questions, get in touch with the community. Keep on making awesome games!

- The HaxeFlixel team

P.S. Don't forget to check out the livestream of the Haxe US summit that is going on right now!