Kha VS jMonkeyEngine

I am glad people are working on it!!

Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha

Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.

I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon.

For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.

Kha (zlib/Haxe) https://github.com/Kode/Kha

So doing the calculation on CPU and including it with other uniforms is the best way to minimise overhead. Have a look at buffers rather than individually binding each variable. See https://github.com/Kode/Kha/issues/1365 for why UBOs are not available in WebGL 2.0.

Kha on haxelib was discontinued many years ago - we sadly now felt it was necessary to remove it entirely from haxelib because people kept using it despite the scary warning message it prints on every run. This "lib" now contains only this readme, please see https://github.com/Kode/Kha/wiki/Getting-Started for instructions on how to actually use Kha.

I ported my https://rpgplayground.com from AS3 to Haxe. It was the most sane technology to replace Flash, because it came with some platform independent benefits (as opposed to coding straight in JavaScript)

Not using Heaps but https://github.com/Kode/Kha.

And I think you are indeed correct in your assumption, since I know plenty of others who made that switch.

I'm looking to some other libs that inspired notan, like http://kha.tech " Ultra-portable, high performance, open source multimedia framework. " Or SFML " SFML provides a simple interface to the various components of your PC, to ease the development of games and multimedia applications. "

At its core the beauty of Flash was the extremely tight interplay between vector graphics in nested timelines, and the the programming environment. Many people compare Flash to Unity, but I really don't find the two all that comparable. You don't create your assets in Unity, and by the time those assets get into Unity you have lost most potential for dynamic behaviour. Flash's tight integration allowed for extremely fast iterations, and its hierarchal model was very flexible and allowed you to work very fast and creatively.

I'm surprised no one has had a good crack at re-creating the core functionality of Flash circa 2004, based on web tech, or something like Kha[1]. I've thought many times about starting such a project. I think the biggest challenges are developing a solid vector rendering runtime alongside the vector drawing tools, but just about everything else that ex-Flashers want can be reduced down to some pretty simple functionality. You could even forego all the cruft of the display list, the event model, etc, and just go with a simpler immediate mode renderer and I think you'd still be retaining those core components that made Flash special.

There are so many use cases (eLearning experience, Digital Signage, Touch Screen Kiosks) that Unity isn't particularly suitable for, and for which HTML/Javascript is just clunky, that such a tool could far better accomodate.

1. https://github.com/Kode/Kha.

Not to forget Kha http://kha.tech/ or even Armory3D https://armory3d.org/

At the time of the check, the latest revision was the e584cb1 commit. We checked it using the static analyzer.

> Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base.

I wonder why some engines are seemingly destined for success and others... aren't.

Godot got really big, despite a somewhat similar feature set: https://godotengine.org/ (really nice 2D support, 3D rendering was worse until version 4, GDScript has both a nice iteration speed but also has gotten some criticism, while C# was a second class citizen in the earlier iterations)

Stride is really nice and seemed like it should have been the Unity replacement that people would look at, if it had gotten more attention and a community would have formed around it, like Godot's.

There's also NeoAxis which is way more Windows centric, but still seems to be getting updates and is comparatively easy to use, yet similarly never got popular: https://www.neoaxis.com/

Weirder yet, Java doesn't really have that many game engines out there, at least the likes of Unity/NeoAxis/Stride that have nice editors, despite the language being pretty nice. The closest I can think of is jMonkeyEngine which I donated some money in the past to, which is pretty usable but similarly niche: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

I occasionally watch videos on the Gamefromscratch YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@gamefromscratch/videos) and it surprises me that there are so many engines out there, but very few actually are in the public eye. If you don't go out of your way to look for other options, you will most likely only have heard of Unity and Unreal (or maybe also Godot in recent years). I wonder why that is.

There more `bare-metal` engines like https://jmonkeyengine.org/ (well it is not C++, it is Java based)...

jMonkeyEngine (Java, Open source): https://jmonkeyengine.org/

This project develops a cross-platform Subspace client and server written in Java. It was developed from scratch on the idea of extensibility and modularity. The server is based on modules/frameworks highly optimized for scaled, networked, grid-based, infinite world physics. The client is based on the JMonkeyEngine, a minimalistic modern developer friendly, open source, game engine

> Godot is one of those pinnacle FOSS projects that just totally impresses me, especially given the state its in now, with 4.0.

It is definitely one of the success stories, at least so far.

For example, there are projects like jMonkeyEngine (a game engine in Java, on top of LWJGL) that don't get as much attention and their movement forwards is way slower: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

There's also Stride 3D, which is a bit closer to Unity I'd say, which is still a really nice project, but is also limited in how much development can be done: https://www.stride3d.net/

Regardless, I wish all of those projects success and would still be glad if Godot could be one of the champions of open source game engines, perhaps as a viable and easy to use alternative to something like Unity for those who want that sort of thing, even in the professional development space eventually!

It is, or at least was, efficient. Java has a great game engine called https://jmonkeyengine.org/ that at the time could compete with Unity, not sure the status now. And LWJGL, the lower layer for ooengl, was quite nice to use and it is efficient to go that low level if you plan to do a game that does not fit the stereotypes in such game engines, as you will find yourself fighting the engine more than the actual game.

This seems interesting https://jmonkeyengine.org , how would I get started?