Cross-platform again

blinkdemo.png
So far, I’ve mostly looked at the flash/swf version but now I will return my attention to cross-platform development.

There are a number of existing libraries that can be used with haXe, but most of these are low level, but what I’m after is a higher level option. So the plan is to build a higher-level layer on top of an existing module. I have chosen to build on top of NME, which is SDL based. My decision was mainly to do with support for opengl, sound/music, font, input and screen management.

In the end, the design wrote itself, based on the simple rule “it should be easy to port something from existing flash code”. Initially I tried writing a substitute library called “flash”, but the haxe compiler rejected me. This is probably best, because, although the alternative requires slightly more porting for the flash case, I think it allows for greater possiblities of minor architectural changes. This has two big advantages – half the work is already done for me and there is an excellent design document for the rest.

The result is a library I have called “blink”. There is essentailly one blink class definition for each flash class. On the flash platform, a simple “typedef” is used to get exactly the same code as native flash. On the neko platform, there is a haxe implementation that ultimately falls through to an NME call.

The library is only at the demo stage, and only implements enough to get the APE demos off the ground, but I think is shows the possibility. The only changes required were to change “flash.” to “blink.”, modify the main-line boot function slightly and make sure to use cross-platform constructs (eg, no “__as__” casting).

The code here (BlinkDemo.zip) shows the same code compiled for flash and neko. It uses a slightly extended NME library, which is provided as a dll in the bin directory – to use the dll, make sure you run the neko.exe in the bin directory so it finds the right one.

The updated performace is (note:using “cast” not “as”):

Car Demo Robot Demo
Original 2.0ms 9.5ms
haXe 1.58ms 9.45ms
hx->as3 1.56ms 9.47ms
neko/nme 4.0ms 16.9ms

On first glance it would appear the numerical processing takes about twice as long under neko as it does under flash. However this code might not be the greatest test because we can see how the performance of the “cast” command can effect the results.

Also of note is that the graphics is quite capable of reaching 100fps, so I do not think the SDL code will be a bottleneck.

I am very pleased with this approach, and I think it might be the way forward for cross platform game development. In some ways (certain) games are easier because they use a generally smaller sub-set of graphics primitives – mostly image drawing.

One Reply to “Cross-platform again”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *