HaxeFlixel vs SFML

Haxe is a powerful, cross-platform and open source language.

All demos have included GitHub link, so you can learn from the examples

Has a starting guide for people who are completely new to HaxeFlixel; from installing Haxe to a beginner-friendly HaxeFlixel tutorial.

(excerpt from source): To help you do this, the (Haxe) toolkit contains three main components:

the Haxe Language - a modern high-level, strictly typed programming language

the Haxe Standard Library - a complete cross-platform standard library

the Haxe Compiler - an incredibly fast cross-compiler

HaxeFlixel is fully free and open source.

(excerpt from source):

There is a multitude of channels to interact with the community:

• Our google groups forums

• #haxeflixel on IRC (freenode.net)

• @HaxeFlixel on Twitter

• The HaxeFlixel organization on GitHub

• The HaxeFlixel page on IndieDB

• Join our development chat on Slack[1]

• HaxeFlixel group on Steam

You can watch variables, log (trace) messages, and check for memory/frame rate performance.

But with considerable improvements -- the HaxeFlixel team are constantly working improving and fixing the HaxeFlixel API, as compared to the original Flixel which is no longer updated.

(Haxe)Flixel does a lot of things for you like tilemaps and collision detection, which makes it super easy to create 2D games.

The HaxeFlixel team and contributors are very active on Github and other community places (like Slack), and are usually able to respond to your questions within a day or two.

Haxe's syntax is similar to AS3, so Flash developers can transition to HaxeFlixel if they are familiar with AS3/Flixel.

The API has all of the features that you'd expect from a powerful engine without sacrificing organization and flexibility

The open source Flash API is powered by OpenFL, which allows you to compile to Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and even major consoles (coming soon).

On Windows, the IDE of choice is FlashDevelop, but if you're looking for cross-platform IDE (Windows/Mac/Linux), there's Sublime Text which includes a package for Haxe syntax highlighting, as well as auto-completion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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;).

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.

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.

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.