10 Year Anniversary!

Wow, 10 years. We have seen a lot in the last decade. Rise of mobile, fall of flash and the rise of html5. And Hxcpp and Nme still manage to survive and adapt.

Nme just had a new release, 6.0.58. And it has seen some big changes. This release completes the move away from shipping static libraries, and instead ships Acadnme hosts for the desktop platforms. This allow you to test quickly with the cppia target without needing a c++ compile. This target now includes just-in-time compiling and runs at a decent speed. The windows target now uses the “angle” library by default for improved performance though a DirectX emulated OpenglES layer.

The latest release contains the reemergence of the javascript browser target. The approach here is quite different from the original ‘jeash’ – it uses almost exactly the same code base as the c++ target by compiling the core Nme library to a asm.js library, and then calling these compiled Nme functions from normal javascript. This javascript is then bundled with the assets into a single “.nme” file for uploading – you can also add cppia byte code to allow the same .nme file to be run anywhere – desktop, mobile, browser.
The .nme file is kept very small by splitting most of the nme classes and asm.js into separate files, which can be shared and cached between apps.

I have revived the original 1000 Ogre demo. The original was in flash, but is now in html5. The preloader is a bit dodgy, but I will work on that.

You can also check out the ubiquitous BunnyMark demo running under the new system.

You can try your own apps with the latest nme and the:
nme jsprime
command.

The cppia and jsprime targets are still quite new, but they both are looking super promising. Let me know over at gitter.im how you go!

5 Replies to “10 Year Anniversary!”

  1. Great news!
    One concern i have is the size of nme.js. 7Mb is quite big for web nowadays. is there any room for improvements regarding js size?

    1. This will gzip to less than 2M, so that should help. This component is also shared between apps and between updates within the same app, so there is a greater chance that this will be cached within the browser.

  2. Happy Birthday NME! Before I known NME (5 years ago) I was hesitant to program games using the Flash API but now I have become a big NME fan, learnt a lot, and we also have not found a limitation of what you can do

    Do you have instructions to try Acadnme+cppia? I have found information only in https://github.com/nmehost/acadnme

    The “angle” library also allowed the new winrt (Windows 10 UWP) target, added just for fun… because this is Haxe 😀
    Actually the target might have some future (remembering Blackberry and Tizen…)

    jsprime is a great addition. A posible next target could be Facebook Gameroom, but not sure about the audience and requirements. Any other target missing?

    A fun, little-known, fact of the history of NME: it ran on PS Vita in 2014. “Kilka Card Gods” was the first latinamerican game on PlayStation Store.

    Cheers

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