When comparing Felgo (formerly V-Play) vs Monkey X, the Slant community recommends Monkey X for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Monkey X is ranked 27th while Felgo (formerly V-Play) is ranked 41st. The most important reason people chose Monkey X is:
Developers can make native calls directly from Monkey code. This allows access to any native functionality and platform-specific features.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Mature cross platform IDE
Qt-Creator IDE with Code Completion, Debugging and Profiling, integrated Quick Help, Version Control and more.
Pro Easy to learn
Felgo is among the easiest cross-platform tools to use according to a survey done by research2guidance.
Pro In-game level editor
With the Level Editor components, you can let your players share their levels with the whole game community which is cool because you don't need to create new levels on your own, but the community helps you with it. There are other community features like rewards for good level creators that helps getting more downloads.
Pro Felgo game network
Leaderboards, Achievements, Challenges are available across platform, even on Desktop. You can also use Cloud Syncinc of your game data that makes it easy to start a game for example on iPhone and then continue on a Nexus Tablet or the other way around.
It is also convenient because sharing to all kind of game services & networks like Facebook & Game Center is possible with a single API call. Custom hosting of Game Network servers is also possible if you want to keep the player data.
Pro Native performance
Although game logic is provided in JavaScript by you, performance-critical parts of the engine like OpenGL ES rendering or particle effects are implemented in rock-solid C++, providing the ultimate performance your game deserves.
Pro Advanced gaming components
Advanced Gaming Components for handling multiple display resolutions & aspect ratios, animations, particles, physics, multi-touch, gestures, path finding and more.
Pro Felgo build server
No need for native SDKs, Build in and Install from Cloud with the Felgo Build Server.
Pro Rapid development
Cut your development time in half. Using the QML language allows for some powerful features that cut code lines and time. Another helpful feature that can help in this area is that there are more than 50 game demos of all genres that come with full source code, meaning one can easily check to see how something was done.
Pro Support can be found in forums and via e-mail
Felgo has friendly forums where core developers participate as well as fast & helpful email support.
Pro Based on Qt framework
The Qt framework is a great and mature framework on its own. Using Qt as a game engine base is a smart idea.
Pro Runtime-balancing
You can use ready-made components to balance any of your game properties at runtime, so also on mobile devices which is great for adjusting forces or input parameters.
Pro Lots of learning resources
Helps get started and improve with lots of tutorials, demo games, examples.
Pro Social services and monetization
In-app purchases, game and social network integration (such as Game Center and Facebook), ads (with Chartboost and AdMob) and analytics (such as Flurry) are all available across platforms.
Pro Frequent updates
Every 2-4 weeks new updates provide additional features and fixes based on what users wanted the most.
Pro Level store
You can even monetize these user-generated levels with in-app purchases with the Felgo Level Store component if you like.
Pro Native code support
Developers can make native calls directly from Monkey code. This allows access to any native functionality and platform-specific features.
Pro Native module support
You are not restricted only to the modules you get from the official release. You can build your own stuff. Even build your own "app" module. It feels limitless. In comparison with other cross platform solutions, you actually get the translated source code and you can play with it if you want.
Pro Built-in modules for quickly building games
Monkey X has a selection of great built-in modules.
- Graphics
- Audio
- Input
- Data and Filesystems
- Networking
- Math
- Text and Strings
- Collections
- Online Services
Pro You can create custom targets
The language gives you the possibility to build your own targets. You are not limited to the targets officially supported.
Pro Low cost license fee
All target platforms for a fair one off license fee.
Pro Easy to learn
With it's Object orientation and clean syntax its a brilliant language to learn if you have never done any programming before and yet still has all the power it needs to make full games and apps.
Pro Uses a great, easy to learn language
Monkey X uses a custom programming language (called Monkey) for all its scripting needs. Monkey is rather easy to learn, it's object-oriented which will help most programmers with understanding it. It's also statically typed and uses a garbage collector, helping to avoid manual memory management.
Pro Partly open-source
The entirety of the base-language itself is open source. Commercial modules such as Mojo for non-free platforms cost a one-time fee. Though Mojo is not free for all targets, the targets for these platforms are, meaning it is possible to implement other frameworks for these targets.
The Desktop (GLFW and C++ based) and HTML5 implementations of Mojo are currently free and open source.
The language's development is completely public, and is managed via GitHub.
Pro Free HTML5 and Desktop (GLFW) target platform
The free version of Monkey X lets you compile to HTML5 or Desktop (GLFW). Other platforms such as iOS, Android (and OUYA), XNA, Flash and Windows 8 (Phone) require the paid version of Monkey X Pro.
Pro Cross-platform
Monkey X is a cross-platform game engine. It allows developers to run the same code on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Flash, Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
The development environment supports Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Pro Not running in its own VM
Unlike other multi-platform engines (Unity3D, Corona, etc), Monkey-X games do not run explicitly in their own virtual machines. Your code is translated into the native languages of each target platform, and then compiled as a native executable. However, just as native games, on platforms such as Android (Currently), and HTML5, games will be ran through the targeted platform's usual VM(s). That being said, you won't be dealing with a proprietary virtual machine, so you won't experience any real overhead when compared to a native game.
Pro Made by the Mark Sibly Factor
The Mark Sibly Factor denotes that a programming language will be easy to learn, fun to learn and allow any age group ( within Cognitive Reason ) to program games and great games. The Mark Sibly Factor denotes also that the games programming language you purchase will be backed by decades of compiler programming experience, game making tool programming and finally a Game Programming Language that kicks Ass.
Pro Free for commercial releases
With the free version of Monkey you are still able to create commercial HTML5 and Desktop games.
Pro Many community modules available
The community has created essential modules:
- Spine for animations
- Box2D and Chipmunk for physics
- Game frameworks such as Ignition, fantomEngine, and Flixel
- Diddy for lots of extra functionality
- FontMachine for custom bitmap fonts
- MiniB3D for 3D gaming
- And several others...
Pro Drawing Commands
Drawing commands are easier to read and edit than is manipulating scene graphs. You can immediately see in your code what's going to be drawn and in what order. Transformations are a no-brainer too.
Pro Lots of great examples
Monkey X includes over 50 examples ranging from complete sample games to demos of single features.
Pro Object oriented programming
MonkeyX is an object-oriented dialect of BASIC that's easy, clean and powerful.
Cons
Con No 3rd party tutorials
There are little to none amount of tutorials for Felgo other than what was made by the engine developers themselves.
Con You'll have to learn a new programming language
Even though Monkey is rather easy to learn and borrows a lot of concepts from more popular languages, having to learn a new language develop games is a lot of friction for people that already know how to program in other languages..
Con The documentation is not very thorough
The documentation contains a reasonably detailed language overview, and a somewhat-generated list of the included modules, classes, and methods. Module descriptions are rather lax, but usually present. Method descriptions tend to be short, and a majority of them contain no usage snippets; most parameters have very minimal descriptions. And there are no community collaboration features to help improve it, besides GitHub.
Con The included IDE is poor
Although better IDE'S are availabe for a price, the default one is bare bones and lacks functionality
Con No real asset store
Untangling how to keep assets in the ".data" requires attention and a filenaming convention.
Con limited OS export targets with free version
Free version only targets Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and HTML5, not mobile.