When comparing Angel2D vs SFML, the Slant community recommends SFML for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” SFML is ranked 35th while Angel2D is ranked 90th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great for prototyping
The framework is focused on prototyping. It has plenty of features to speed up development. It has a console with a lua interpreter, tuning variables and function calls. GWEN is well supported. Provides a simple interface for Box2D. A simple messaging system with which entities can subscribe to to receive messsages among other things.
Pro Permissive licence and easy to extend
Angel2D is built with the idea that you the game developer should have control over the framework and be able to add features if you like. So the code is BSD-licenced and very easy to extend for anyone that has completed a basic C++ course or equivalent.
Pro Great performance
While Angel2D isn't the best performing framework out there it's certainly no slog when compared to competition. Simply by the virtue of being native it puts itself ahead of engines like Gamemaker and frameworks like Love2D.
Pro Simple interface to lua scripting
If you're not comfortable with a basic subset of C++ it is not recommended to use this framework. But the Lua scripting platform is very nice for generating actors.
Pro Very helpful and simple project set up for newcomers
Often with game engines they throw you into unfamiliar territory and let you explore for yourself. While this wouldn't be a big issue with Angel2D due to it being a very simple framework it kickstarts your game prototyping.
Pro Focused on providing convenient features
Angel was created with game jams in mind, so it's focused on providing as many convenient features as possible, but in a quickly understandable way.
Pro Cross platform
Angel can create games for Windows, the Mac, most flavors of Linux, and iOS. It uses the native build systems on each platform (Visual Studio, Xcode, Make), so you can be up and running as soon as possible.
Pro Low-level code is easily accessible
Low-level code that Angel wraps is always just an easy click away, ready to be overridden or improved.
Pro Very light wrapping on all of the libraries
A very important point that's often underestimated. This framework is designed to be removed. It's not there to provide a complete engine for you which you will have trouble moving away from. The basic interface to Box2D is very spartan. You're given the simplest of Box2D shapes, not even polygonal fixtures. This limitation (seems to be) there so that the integration with the engine is very low. You never create a physics actor with anything more complicated than an enum describing if it's supposed to be a sphere shape or box shape.
Pro Very efficient and usable
Pro Zlib/PNG license
In short, SFML is free for any use (commercial or personal, proprietary or open-source). You can use SFML in your project without any restriction. You can even omit to mention that you use SFML -- although it would be appreciated.
Pro Can be combined with OpenGL
If you hate something about the way SFML handles graphics, you can just combine it with OpenGL. It's completely smooth and works as expected, without any additional dependencies.
Pro Active community and wiki
You can ask questions on their own personal forum which is full of users, and their wiki is constantly being maintained. They even have an IRC.
Pro Works on every platform
SFML 2.2 brought forth Android & iOS functionality, and SFML games work on Linux, Mac and Windows out of the box, since SFML is written with OpenGL.
Pro Great documentation
SFML is very well documented, even with short examples of use for many functions and modules. Furthermore, there are books like 'SFML essentials' and 'SFML for game development' which teach you how to use this library to its fullest.
Pro Good for OpenGL
If you are thinking about using OpenGL, look no further, you can open a window, and handle events in less than 15 lines, and it provides input, time, and even networking, plus alot more. It has become my favorite c++ library :D
Pro Great library
SFML is a collection of modular, well designed libraries you can implement an engine or game on top of. The API provides tons of good documentation and is very straightforward to use. You can get a game up and running with SFML quite quickly and with minimal effort.
Pro Clean code
An SFML project's code-base is usually clean and easy to read. All public SFML classes are under the namespace "sf" so it is easy to tell which code is yours and which belongs to SFML (of course you can stop this by typing using namespace sf;
).
Pro Available in many languages
There's support for many languages besides C++, current supported languages are: C, .NET, Crystal, D, Euphoria, Go, Java, Julia, Nim, OCaml, Pascal, Python, Ruby and Rust, and this list is constantly growing.
Pro Beginner-friendly
SFML is extremely beginner friendly and even provides pre-built libraries for your IDE of choice on Windows. Besides the fact that it's extremely well documented, they also have a set of tutorials that walk you through every module.
Pro Modern C++11 implementation
SFML is one of the few good C++ frameworks out there to actually make full use of the language. It's extremely well optimized and it plays well with anything you throw at it.
Cons
Con No asset pipeline
Unlike XNA/Monogame, Gamemaker or many other similar platforms, Angel2D doesn't have an asset pipeline. The extents of the asset importing is manually loading individual files in code or naming them according to a convention to load a set of them.
Con No longer supported
Hasn't been updated in 2 years.
Con Incomplete documentation
The entire framework is technically documented at http://docs.angel2d.com/ but certain functionality isn't described in there but rather it's just a list of functions. They all have descriptive names and it should be common to run into a feature which isn't given example to in the "Introgame"-project example.
Con Abandoned by developers
Sadly this project has been abandoned by the developer. The main github doesn't see any pull requests fulfilled anymore. There's a debugline draw fix on the github that's rather simple to fix. It is recommended you pull that fork rather than the master branch. Though the simplicity of the framework still makes it a good choice for prototyping.
Con Relatively slow
Compared to SDL2, GLFW, it is slow.
Con No GUI editor or IDE
Does not include any IDE or media editor. It's purely source code.
Con May take longer to learn and understand
Con Messy sprite management
Sprites retain all of the operations applied to them, whether that be a new position or a rotation. This makes sprite management somewhat annoying.
Con Not specifically a 2D game engine
It isn't really an engine, more of a collection of modular, well designed libraries you can implement an engine or game on top of.