Monkey vs Unity 2D

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Socoder -> On Topic -> Monkey vs Unity 2D
Fri, 15 Aug 2014, 11:58
steve_ancell	I don't know much about Unity, but have you considered Allegro Game Library?. It also targets iOS and Android devices, the only reason I don't use it personally is because it don't seem to target browsers. alleg.sourceforge.net/readme.html
Fri, 15 Aug 2014, 12:03
Jayenkai	I've not used Unity. Haven't even tried. I'm aware that there's "free" functionality, but I'm also aware that to do any of the important stuff, the price goes sky high!!! So, as much as it'll probably be an easier language, and a "better" tool, in all honesty, I'm pretty sure that anything I'll need is doable in Monkey. I just need to work that little bit more to do it. .. And I'm ok with that. You get what you pay for, and as long as you're prepared to put the effort in, Monkey can do an alarming amount of stuff. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 15 Aug 2014, 12:12
steve_ancell	I just hope that the Monkey and Blitz sites don't get suddenly ditched the same way Blitzcoder was. If Mark is considering bailing-out, it hope he could pass the gauntlet onto someone who has the giblets to keep the Monkey and Blitz thing going.
Fri, 15 Aug 2014, 12:48
cyangames	Okay, I've nearly finished games in both engines and each have their advantages / disadvantages. With Unity a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you which is a massive plus point. You can port to PC / MAC / Linux / iPhone / OUYA / Gamestick / Windows Mobile / Android / PS Vita all using the free version You can drag and drop assets and they just work. You can mix 2D with 3D and apply 3d effects to 2d scenes with ease. Simpler Font Support A larger community, asset store and many, many plug-ins The Default IDE comes with all the important things such as auto-completion, syntax highlighting, etc. Generally, it's a bit less involved than Monkey-X. However..... Monkey-X has a lot of advantages over Unity3D, Particularly for 2D e.g: When handling bitmaps there's no flipping of the y-axis needed to get textures working okay. In unity it's a pain in the arse. You know that you're working with basic elements and can have greater control over how they work. It takes a bit more effort to get there than in unity but is all the more satisfying the result. You can still port to PC / MAC / Linux / iPhone / OUYA / Gamestick / Windows Mobile / Android, arguably with greater ease, particularly with regards to micro consoles. 2D Works as it should do, on a 2d plane, not on a 3D one. There are still easy interfaces to sprite handling, rotation, flipping , scaling, etc. It's all code driven, which can be a good thing. Simple integration for gamecentre, etc. The only thing that i dislike about monkey is the IDE. No autocomplete there, at least not in the version I've used. If this has been added, then that's great! Hope this helps out, Both languages are very capable and yet differ greatly in their approach. -=-=- Web / Game Dev, occasionally finishes off coding games also!
Fri, 15 Aug 2014, 12:49
Jayenkai	Blitzcoder wasn't abandoned, though. It was bought by the current seller of Blitz2D, who then stopped selling Blitz2D, then crapped all over it, scrapped BC, rebooted it as CW, then eventually killed it entirely. ... RAWR!! Stomp stomp stomp!! Blitzbasic/Max/monkey sites will be there for some time to come. Theres no need for them not to be. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 15 Aug 2014, 18:56
steve_ancell	GfK One limitation that springs to mind in Monkey was that there is no pixmap equivalent. Something I was trying to do recently was simply to find a clicked point within an image and check the colour/alpha at that location. The general view on the monkey forum was that it couldn't be done. The best suggestion I got was to draw the image to the backbuffer, then read into an array, pixel by pixel Yeah that is a bit annoying, I needed pixel-perfect collision detection in Mutant Monty and resorted to using Blitz3D to make a textmap of zeros and ones from the bitmaps. Those zeros and ones were then reloded into an array in Monkey, not the perfect workaround but it did the job.
Sat, 16 Aug 2014, 08:58
Jayenkai	One of the first things I did in my Monkey Framework was to stagger the loading of ... Everything! Each item has it's own frame, from the font to the SFX. That's why my "click To Start" thing then does the spinny circles. That's it loading. Leaving a gap between each item gives you time to do extra stuff, like how you'd want to grab pixel data. Other learned things.. I stuck to only ever drawing and reading 64x64 pixel blocks to the screen. I can't remember why, but it'll probably have been an Android Fragmentation issue. In addition, lots of Android devices do dithering, so don't expect the "GrabPixels" data to be accurate. Pisses me off that that's broken.. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''