Welcome to Issue 65 of Phaser World
Stickman death! Swamps! Jigsaws! Pong! String! Plugins! It's another packed issue :) Also we've now hit 7000 subscribers! Woohoo! Welcome to all the new readers this week - hope you enjoy this issue :)
Until the next issue, keep on coding. Drop me a line if you've got any news you'd like featured (you can just reply to this email) or grab me on the Phaser Slack or Discord channels.
Games made with Phaser
Game of the Week
In Vex 3 you must avoid traps, run, jump, slide and swim through 10 levels and 9 extra challenge modes.
Staff Pick
For decades Jan van Haasteren has created highly detailed, colourful and, above all, humorous puzzles which you can now play online.
A tiny, fast little puzzle game of blocking clicking, color-matching.
A brief meditation on the broken swamplands of Louisiana's future.
Connect all of the number blocks together, making sure they touch the correct number of neighbors.
Phaser News & Tutorials
Emanuele describes updating his String Avoider game for Phaser 2.6.2.
A series of tutorial videos about re-creating the Atari classic in Phaser.
Open Source Evolution of Phaser
A video showing the creation of Phaser, from the very first commit and on.
Save game information in a clean format that also exports saving to local storage, cookies or a RESTful API.
A nice template package that allows you to easily wrap Phaser games with Electron, to create desktop apps.
Patreon Updates
No new Phaser Patrons or donations this week! ~sad panda~
Patreon is a way to donate money towards the Phaser project on a monthly basis. This money is used entirely to fund development costs. You can also make one-off donations via PayPal. Donations receive discounts, forum badges, private technical support, and the eternal gratitude of the Phaser team :)
Development Progress
The image above, that of the Fellowship of the Ring looking out towards their final destination, far away in the distance, feels very appropriate right now.
Felipe and I have absolutely worked our butts off on Phaser 3 this week. 27 major commits, hundreds of lines of source code, piles of tests and examples created. We accomplished some major tasks. The SpriteBatch was overhauled, adding in lots of new features. The Blitter object was merged into the core renderer, blend mode support was added in, and numerous small tweaks and errors fixed all over the place. And yet we're still not where we wanted to be.
It honestly feels like we're in Mordor, trying to scale Mount Doom.
Part of the work we did this week was to carefully evaluate the main game loop. I literally broke the whole loop down, function by function, and we graphed out the whole thing. Then we created some performance tests for key parts of it, and it clearly displayed some issues to us. Everything worked, it just didn't run as fast as either of us wanted. A lot of time was spent lost in iteration of the scene graph each frame, with too much branching going on, killing the speed advantage our new batch renderer had given us. In our tech demos we were happily blasting 1 million objects around the screen. Inside of the full game loop, we struggled to hit 10,000 (at 60fps). It was a particularly demoralizing find.
After much discussion we spent a couple of days exploring alternatives. We looked at using an RTree for spatial separation of game objects, and while the figures were very impressive, it wasn't suitable for a scene graph as it lost all context of parenting. On the plus side, we do now have a superbly fast RTree implementation which we can use for the broadphase checks in physics (replacing the slow QuadTree from v2).
Then we looked at ways to speed-up iterating through the display list. Swapping to doubly linked lists, and a truly flat rendering list, to avoid branching and misprediction, and to improve data locality. This did indeed start performing a lot better. We then threw viewport culling into the mix, and started tackling the Transform class. As every single game object in the world has a Transform, and as it's vital to pretty much everything, being the custodian of game object placement and representation in the world, it was essential it was fast, but still offered the features you all need (like easily being able to scale a sprite, or easily get the true world coordinates of a sprite without first having to wait until a render pass has occurred, like you do in v2). The problem is that an immediate (as opposed to deferred) Transform is more expensive. But as Felipe said to me: "the fastest game engine in the world is an empty file", and he's right - it's useless of course, but it's fast. And what we're building here has to be useful too.
So all in all it's been a mixed week. We've poured hours and hours into it. I personally have been coding until the small hours several times (4am? oh hello again!) and while I know we've made great progress, it feels like we've actually slipped down Mount Doom a bit, rather than got higher up. Then again, that is the life of software development isn't it? It can't always go well, you can't always move forwards, but as long as you're still trying, and as long as you're still heading in the right direction, you'll get there eventually.
Here's hoping for an easier next week! :)
Phaser 3 Mailing List and Developers Guide
If you're interested in helping evolve the shape of Phaser 3, then please join the Phaser 3 Google Group. Discussions this week have included varying render loops. The group is for anyone who wishes to help shape what the Phaser 3 API and feature-set will contain.
The Phaser 3 Developers Guide is available. Essential reading for anyone who'd like to help build Phaser 3.
Geek Links
The image above is from a beautiful twirl shader by Altered Qualia. Click to randomize it, mouse around to zoom around.
Safari 10.1 has landed and it has some great new features for games, including gamepad support and pointer lock. They've also changed it so that on MacBooks with 2 GPUs, WebGL will always use the low powered GPU. Typical Apple: a kiss on one cheek mixed with a slap on the other.
Finally the Bad Lip Reading video of the Trump Inauguration was so fantastic I literally had tears in my eyes :)
Phaser Releases
The current version of Phaser CE is 2.7.3 released on January 9th 2017.
Phaser 3.0.0 is in active development in the GitHub v3 folder.
Please help support Phaser development
Have some news you'd like published? Email support@phaser.io or tweet us.
Missed an issue? Check out the Back Issues page.