Hello, world! – The Flax Project
As you probably know, “Hello World” is the infamous first-time program that virtually every programmer has written. At the time, you (at least, us), as a programmer, can’ t even fathom just how deep the proverbial rabbit hole goes.It’s amazing how vast the whole topic of computer science is. Programming languages, operating systems, hardware, the internet, the list goes on and on. This is why neither of us can properly define what the Flax project is. It’s been many things since its conception, and finally it’s here.
The Flax project is a website (among other things), brimming with a passion for programming and technology in general. Heading this up are two Irish Game Development students, Ciarán McCann and Carl Lange. We’re trying to expand our knowledge and share what knowledge we have with the world, so expect many tutorials and tech demos on a bunch of topics, ranging from web-based technology like GWT and HTML5 (+CSS+Javascript) to GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. The blog here will host these tutorials and posting which will be added to on a weekly basis.
Now, on to the main focus of this project, the Flax Game Engine. Today’s computing is evolving with new devices, new platforms, and new markets. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the internet. Through new advancements in browsers, application on the web are becoming as rich and as functional (if not even more so) as their desktop counterparts. Though gaming in browsers has been around nearly as long as the Internet itself, browser plugins such as Adobe Flash or Unity’s Web Player are often required.
The Flax Engine (henceforth called Flax) is to be a 2D game engine for the web, using features introduced in HTML5, specifically the canvas and audio tags. Flax will be developed in Java using GWT 2.0 to cross compile the code into robust JavaScript code which will run across all mordern browsers and is intended to be a native framework for developing 2D browser-based games. Adobe Flash is used to program the vast majority of browser-based games (with Java applets coming distant second), though Flash is not supported on many mobile devices (specifically, any running Apple’s iOS) and is also rather heavy on hardware requirements. Also with the upcoming release of an operating system which completely depends on the Internet for its applications and data storage (Chromium OS) we are very excited about being able to develop games for these type of mobile devices.
All in all, this project should prove to be very interesting, and hopefully useful to other developers out there.
Now, meet the developers
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