phaser > pixi

[dcsan]

I understand phaser uses Pixi as its rendering engine. What are the main features that phaser adds on top?

 

It seems pixi has a scene graph, and touch support, which is a bit more than some renderers.

Phaser seems to add on top various physics engines.... and has a huge API, but if someone could help point out the main diffs that would be appreciated.

 

 

Phaser also allows you call Pixi directly it seems?

http://docs.phaser.io/PIXI.html

 

If there isn't much overhead, it would seem then that there's no reason to just use pixi as phaser will give all the benefits and more?

 

refs:

http://www.goodboydigital.com/pixijs/docs/

http://examples.phaser.io/

[WitheringTreant]

The answer to that is subject to change when phaser 3 comes out. It will no longer use pixi.

[spencerTL]

Phaser is built to make making games easier so, for eg, PIXI sprites are extended to have health properties, among many others. If you aren't making games maybe you don't need these features but many are very useful in other ways. In my case, I don't make games, just education resources but I find that Phaser's extras are very useful indeed and have sped my work up considerably compared to just a rendererer (I previously used createjs)

[rich]

Off the top of my head, here is what Phaser adds onto Pixi:

 

• Choice of physics systems (arcade or full body)
• A Game World and a Camera which can pan around it
• Tilemap support
• A particle system
• Sound support (both web audio and legacy audio)
• More advanced input handling (input priority, drag and drop, etc)
• Keyboard and Gamepad inputs
• Scale Manager to handle game / scene resizing + full screen support
• Tween Manager for tweening game objects, hooked into the core clock (so it pauses properly when your game does)
• Asset loader (supporting all kinds of file types) and Cache
• A State Manager to let you swap between game states easily
• Game clock + custom timers + timer events

 

And probably lots more I forgot. As someone has commented though, it depends entirely on what you want to make. Lots of people use Pixi who don't make games at all. However as this is a game dev forum, I'm going to suspect you do

 

I guess just try it. If you don't like it put it down to experience and just use Pixi "raw".

[dcsan]

The answer to that is subject to change when phaser 3 comes out. It will no longer use pixi.

 

interesting. I took a look at the dev log http://www.photonstorm.com/topics/phaser-3

but there doesn't seem to be much background on the reason there, is there any more info on that? I guess i'll post in the phaser3 thread.

[dcsan]

 

> Lots of people use Pixi who don't make games at all. However as this is a game dev forum, I'm going to suspect you do

 

my application is games, but educational and language games.

 

I was actually looking for something with a DOM renderer but none of the active game engines seem to really support this anymore. I had been using d3.js with translate() methods so i could get hardware acceleration. but had some issues with repainting, so I guess i have to move to a real game engine... 

[d13]

I was actually looking for something with a DOM renderer 

 

You might want to consider this:

 

www.famo.us

 

It's a very fast DOM renderer based on game-engine principles.

If might be a good solution if your game uses a lot of text.