Blog

• Getting Rid of Flash ?
  Posted on Dec 22 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  In the past months and especially the past weeks I've been working on the H3D/H2D library which is available on github here : http://github.com/ncannasse/h3d

  The h3d part is a generalistic low level 3D engine that wraps and abstract the Flash Stage3D API. It also nows integrate well with HxSL shader engine v2 http://github.com/ncannasse/hxsl and have a scene graph that makes it easy to manipulate 3D objects, with support for the popular FBX file format with Skinned meshes animation support.

  Here's a quick example that shows the result (model is made by Shiro Games for our upcoming game Evoland).

  [fbxViewer.swf]

  But more often you want also to use the same engine to display 2D sprites so I have added the h2d package that provides a full scene with 2D objects : Bitmaps, but also Tile groups, Text, etc.

  I've actually built by last LudumDare Compo entry Small Theft...

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  17 comments
• Haxe Foundation
  Posted on Nov 15 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  After years of development, Haxe finally have its dedicated Foundation !

  I think that given Haxe increasing success over the past years it should have been done before, but I was lacking the time and focus for it. After leaving Motion-Twin to create Shiro Games it was necessary to make it clear for our users that Haxe is here to stay, and will be supported in the long term.

  The Haxe Foundation is now the main point of contact for companies that want to adopt Haxe and have questions about it. We are also offering Paid Support Plans and sponsoring various Haxe-related open source projects.

  You can read more about it on http://haxe-foundation.org

  Long live to Haxe, long live to the Haxe Foundation !

  5 comments
• Evoland
  Posted on Aug 29 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  On Sunday night when I went bed at 4am, tired but satisfied by the game I built in 48 hours for the 24th Ludum Dare, i was not expecting that the next day it will be such a success.

  

  First thing I learnt this morning was that DropBox was limiting the amount of traffic you can have on your Public links, and that it has then blocked the game. I was quite surprised since it didn't happen before with my previous games.

  Then I started noticing little by little that the game buzz had spread a lot further than the original LD contest...

  Here's so far the press links I have found :

  • Boing Boing
  • IndieGames.com
  • Reddit Thread
  • FreeIndieGam.es
  • HowToGeek
  • LazyTechGuys
  • I Heart Chaos
  • PCWorld

  And in French :

  • Gizmondo.fr
  • Le Figaro Blog
  • LeMonde Blog
  • JeuxActu.com
  • JeuxVideo.org
  • Ash-K.fr
  • Nikopik.com
  • AFJV
  • GameBlog.fr

  ... and looks like there's more to come as the buzz is spreading, with a lot of tweets

  That was, well, unexpected, and even if more reviews does not guarantee at all a good final score for the LD contest, I'm qui...

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  13 comments
• Announcing Shiro Games !
  Posted on Aug 13 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  A few months ago I announced that I was leaving Motion-Twin.

  After giving some thoughts to different opportunities, I have settled to start again from scratch a new game company called Shiro Games

  We will be making games. Great games. And we have big dreams for the present and future (one of them is to move the company office into an actual castle - since Shiro means both castle and white in japanese).

  I will be teaming with Sebastien Vidal, which was director at NCSoft Europe, and our first game will be available for PC in mid-2013

  Please check our brand new website at http://shirogames.com

  Oh ! And most important : we are RECRUITING !

  If you want to join our team and work on the (hopefully) next big thing ™, don't hesitate to contact us !

  And even if you're not interested, please spread the word :)

  4 comments
• Haxe 2.10 Released
  Posted on Jul 16 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  Haxe 2.10 has been released !

  It's one of the best release so far : two new targets (Java and C#) at once, and many cool features, languages improvements and fixes !

  Check it out there : http://haxe.org/doc/release/2.10

  6 comments
• Haxe 2.10 RC
  Posted on Jun 22 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse
  

  Today we're making available for testing the Haxe 2.10 Release Candidate.

  At first, 2.09 was supposed to be the last 2.x so we can focus on 3.0, but we got so many nice things that we decided to make a mid-term release, still keeping best compatibility with 2.x, and allowing you also to enable some of the Haxe3 changes by adding a simple -D haxe3 to your compilation parameters.

  Here's a very short list of the main things we got in 2.10 :

  • Java and C# targets ! compile with -java or -cs to output Java or C# source code ! Big thanks to Cauê Waneck which is working on this. It's still in beta, should be a lot better for 3.0, but you can already play with it, report bugs and improvements.

  • Reduced JS output : we worked a lot so that --dead-code-elimination really eliminates a lot of standard Haxe things from the output. As you can see on http://try.haxe.org/#1cf90, a simple Hello Haxe example will be reduced to only 7 lines of JS. We will still activate great features such as reflection,...

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  11 comments
• Reification for Macros
  Posted on Jun 17 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  In case you don't know, Haxe has a power macro system which allows you to do a lot of compile-time checking and code generation. It's a really neat feature that enable you to extend the language in many different ways while still keeping the same syntax and being strictly typed.

  But up to now it was quite difficult to write macros, since you had to construct the AST (which is the piece of Haxe code you want to generate) by-hand with enums. For instance let's say you want to generate a String "Hello World", you would have to write :

  @:macro static function hello() {
      var pos = haxe.macro.Context.currentPosition();
      return { expr : EConst(CString("Hello World")), pos : pos };
  }

  And for a more complex for( x in 0...n ) loop :

  // repeat the expression 'e' for 'n' times
  @:macro static function repeat( e : Expr, n : Int ) {
      var pos = haxe.macro.Context.currentPosition();
      // 0...n
      var ezero = { expr : EConst(CInt(0)), pos : pos };
      var eN = { expr : EConst(CInt...

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  12 comments
• Time For New Adventures
  Posted on May 25 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  As announced on the Haxe mailing list, after more than 10 years I'll be leaving Motion-Twin in a few months.

  This will not affect in any aspect my personal investment in Haxe or any part of the project, since most of the time spent in compiler development was already made on my spare/hobby time. I will also make sure that any future work that I do after that is mostly done in Haxe, since I don't feel much like writing in another language anymore.

  In order to have something very clean for Haxe perceptions for companies, I'll make sure that we create soon a Haxe Foundation (NonProfit) that will hold the rights on the code, trademark, host the website etc. Any help is welcome.

  I have not 100% decided yet what I will do next, although I have some serious paths I'm currently exploring. I might then be still open to proposals ;)

  Time for new adventures !

  15 comments
• Thunderbird Trash Folder
  Posted on May 12 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  Just for the record, I'm posting this here. It might help other people as well, or myself if I forget exactly how I did it the first time.

  I'm using Thunderbird with IMAP quite often. It works quite nicely. However specifying an alternative Trash folder doesn't always work as expected.

  For instance on your GMail account Thunderbird will correctly detect that your trash is in [Gmail]/Trash, but messages put in that Trash are automatically deleted after 30 days. I prefer in general to keep all my old mails in an Archives folder.

  Thunderbird has a nice option that ask you in which folder you want deleted items to placed, but that's not exactly what it does. Actually this give it another "Default Trash" folder name, as shown in the prefs.js (it is stored in a trash_folder_name key).

  And this other trash folder will conflict with Gmail one, leading in most of the cases your mails being put in the Gmail Trash instead of your custom one.

  One simple fix I found is to Unsubscribe to t...

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  0 comment
• WWX Conference Review
  Posted on Apr 17 2012
  by Nicolas Cannasse

  Had a lot of fun at the WWX conference this weekend !

  We had many great speakers, covering many different topics. The Haxe ability to target many different platforms is a real freedom that enable a high level of innovation.

  For those who were not there, here's a quick resume until the recordings are made available :

  Day 1

  • I made a keynote about the year that we went past, announced Haxe 2.09 release and detailed its changes, then presented plans about Haxe 3.0 that we will start working now and finally talked about medium and long terms plans for Haxe, such as creating a non-profit foundation. Here's my slides if you want to check them.

  • Franco Ponticelli presented the work he's making at ReportGrid with very nice SVG graphics, entirely done in Haxe

  • The Silex Labs team, which did also a great job at organizing the conference, presented the promising Cocktail library : a full HTML+CSS engine written in pure Haxe, which can run into Flash and NME

  • Hugh Sanderson (GameHaxe) presented the ...

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  3 comments