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So over a year ago I bought a copy of Impact and loved it but work / life / laziness I'm finally seriously into something but wondering if I should look around some more.

It seems impact is rather inactive but still does enough of what I want and I have the ability to add whats missing.

While weltmeister is pretty nice I like Tiled

I'm not against paying for something as I did for Impact but I see very few paid engines having the amount of community support that active open source engines do

But I hate to have paid out $99 and never use it for anything.

Currently considering melonjs or phaser

First run at Melonjs I loved but an update ruined a lot of work / don't think upgrading should require a complete rewrite but will re-evaluate as my code was just quick / sloppy does this work kind of code

To me, Impact still has one major thing going for it, and that is its structure. It is a well organized engine that makes well organized games, mostly due to its module pattern.

But beyond that, Impact has fallen sorely behind. Weltmeister is quite poor compared to Tiled, which most other engines support. Impact has no WebGL support and fairly rudimentary Canvas support, whereas Phaser uses a pretty high-end rendering engine called PixiJS that uses WebGL by default (much faster) but can fallback to Canvas. Phaser comes with a Box2D-like "deep physics" engine out-of-the-box called P2, whereas in Impact you have to wire-up Box2D yourself.

A lot of the things Impact is missing as far as the core engine is concerned are added by Impact++, but a lot of people have a hard time getting started with Impact++. And beyond that, like you said it has become fairly inactive compared to engines like Phaser and Kiwi.

The only real downside to Phaser is that you have to supply your own structure, but at least it is not opinionated on how you do it. You can use CommonJS, standard JS object patterns, AMD, or even load the whole thing into Typescript and work with traditional OOP.

I was pretty much in the same boat, where I had paid $99 for Impact but hadn't used it. But mehh...time passes and it just really isn't the premier engine it used to be, so I would much rather know I wasted $99 but am working with the best engine possible rather than work with an engine behind the times so that my money wasn't wasted.

I have gotten a lot of uses out of impact but I too am not really using it anymore. I have moved on to Phaser. It is free and like Jack said you can use your own structure which I like. It is also updated more frequently and sharing your source is far easier and nothing has to be baked.

Yep! Phaser gets tons of great updates because it is created and mostly maintained by a couple of guys who use it everyday in their HTML5 game development business. Just the creator I believe says he has about 40 games made with it if I remember right. So it is really keeping up well with the times since clients keep coming to him wanting new and cutting edge features, so he gets paid to build and integrate those features into his engine (obviously not game-specific features, as those would belong to his client, but for example, I bet a client asked for their game to support WebGL, so he had to build WebGL into his engine and then it filtered down to the public release {before Pixi was the rendering core}).

I'm liking Phaser, probably more before this coming weekend is over as I learn more https://mobsor.com/phasermbd/

I do like the structure of impact but I think those things can be overcome easier then overcoming what is missing

mattferndale wrote:I do like the structure of impact but I think those things can be overcome easier then overcoming what is missing

This is pretty much my thoughts as well. I can pretty easily throw in an object-factory pattern for OOP much easier than I can implement a WebGL rendering engine