Bold Pixel Engine v2 Annoucement

Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know of some stuff going on regarding Bold Pixel Engine.

Collaboration with Arne G. Strout

It really felt great to hear about a developer wanting to build on BPE to make it go further. That’s what I felt when I read Arne G. Strout blog post about BPE. Under the spirit of open-source, Arne offered a great deal of thought and ideas regarding our little framework.

In the meantime, v2 was already under way so we exchanged some ideas and I’m pleased to announce that Arne will be collaborating in v2 development.

Box2D integration…

Wrapping Box2D in a minimalist Bold Pixel Engine kind of package is no easy treat, but it’s done. It doesn’t offer the full potential of Box2D yet and it’s not integrated with blit, but it will and it’s working great.

Toolkit changes

Manager has been removed from the toolkit package and it is now the manager of all the engine. Again this is related to a minimalist approach. Box2D wrapping needed information about framerate and we could get it from the main movieclip that is passed to the manager. This also offers other possibilities like controlling mouse focus, quality, yada yada yada.

I’m cooking a Button manager. I know most developers don’t really like SimpleButtons, but I actually do! What I was lacking was a central point to control those… it’s being taken care of.

Scene and Music will now have transitions. This is possible mostly due to Greensock tweening library, which Vortix Games now officially supports by becoming a member of the Club Greensock.

And that’s it!

There won’t be many news in the next weeks, since we have a lot of work (remember that we kinda disappear when we are just starting up a contract project) and the rest of the bunch, like the Japan game, Bold Pixel Engine and so on.