Pixi JS 4 or Phaser 2.7.3

[mvGraph]

Greetings everyone! I'm new on this HTML5 game development world!

I am a 2D artist and my team was working on JAVA (Libgdx). Now a new project came in and it is for web. We need some advice at the moment of choose the Framework to use... we looked to PixiJS because it has the better Spine (updated to its last version :D) support we've found and the showcase in its page is amazing! But reading here and there, it is said that Pixi JS is just a renderer whereas Phaser is a complete game engine. Then we found Phaser is using a very old version of Pixi.. and even Phaser 3 is droping Pixi for an own renderer... We read about some important drops of fps on games made with Phaser 2.x on mobile systems...  and read about the nice rendering capabilities of PixiJS. so...  many wild questions appeared.

Those amazing games at the showcase at the Pixi JS 4 are enterly made with it?

What do we have to keep on mind when developing a game with PixiJS? 

Should we have to consider a 3rd option? (Having on mind that Spine support is very important to us).

 

Thanks and I hope to learn a lot from you guys

[ivan.popelyshev]

What do you need from phaser, what kind of physics?

[mvGraph]

For example, Phaser has a lot of examples with inputs whereas PixiJS has examples of how to render things and a little few interactions mouse based. I'm not sure if we are gonna to use BOX2D but it's always a good thing to know that you can count on that.

[mattstyles]

Phaser handles stuff like an FSM for state management (in this case, state is stuff like menu screen, game screen, game-over screen etc etc), rendering, audio helpers, loading helpers and input helpers (plus it probably does plenty of other stuff too, like tying in a physics engine for example) so if you ditch Phaser then you'd have to work out your own solution for those requirements.

I've tied Pixi into both P2 and Matter for physics stuff and it was super easy to do so as both physics libraries have great support for tacking on your own renderer.

For audio stuff I haven't strayed too far from Howler, which generally works really well.

Loading stuff: Pixi has a loader and I think you can extend it to work for other assets too, although creating your own dedicated loading mechanism isn't too difficult (depending on how smart you want to get).

For input stuff, there are libraries out there like Hammer which can make dealing with more complex interactions easier but Pixi has helpers for attaching stuff like click handlers to elements (i.e. sprites etc) it creates so this challenge is hardly insurmountable either.

The FSM stuff that handles game state and transitions between states can be more of a chore to create but by creating it yourself you can tailor it better to your application and what you need.

There are loads of other libraries out there too to help handling these requirements, you just have to stitch them together or create a layer to poke at them or allow them to communicate, again, depending on what you actually want from your application coding this yourself should give you a better solution (at the cost of dev time, as with all things, this is often the decision you end up having to make).

[mvGraph]

Thanks! Your answer gave me a clear idea of what to look for

 

we are sticking with PixiJS for now 

[nisim]

I know Phaser contain Pixi.js, but what is Pixi.js version it contains?

I see inside the Phaser build folder pixi.js file, but I don't see version inside it. Pixi is now on 4.5.1 version and have some advanced stuff, but is updated from Pixi repository? I searched and can't find any sign on that.

where can I find Pixi version inside Phaser repository?

thanks,

Nisim

 

[rich]

Phaser uses its own custom version of Pixi (and has done since it very first integrated it several years ago), you can't swap it out for another version. If you need a feature specifically from Pixi 4 then I'd recommend using Pixi 4 directly and skipping Phaser (although it depends on what feature that is really).