Actionscript

Wow, it’s been a while since we first revealed Pixelwave. I’m delighted to announce that Pixelwave is now publicly available to everyone.

Today marks the official birth day of Pixelwave as it leaves the warm womb of the private beta phase and enters the real world. We are very thankful to our awesome testers who gave us priceless feedback and support. But, as Simon would say, enough with all the self-indulgent nonsense. What are you waiting for? Give it a go.

Where do I start?

We’ve created a comprehensive documentation center to help ease the learning curve as much as possible.

Your very first step should probably be the getting started guide.

What’s Pixelwave all about?

Pixelwave is the framework we’ve always wanted to use. It lets you easily create fast, efficient, hardware-accelerated 2D games and interactive applications for iOS. Being game developers with a background in web, we were inspired to model it after the ActionScript 3 API.

Pixelwave was designed with the following goals in mind:

• Speed – We try to get the most out of the device by coding all the core stuff in C and doing lots of invisible OpenGL optimizations.
• Simplicity – Above all, we believe a great framework must be easy to use. Pixelwave’s interface is written in pure object-oriented Objective-C. We labored over each class, method, and property name to create an intuitive and accessible interface.
• Documentation – At the end of the day, even the greatest open source project would be unusable by most without proper documentation. We’re actively trying to avoid that.
• Open source – What started out as a small internal project has already grown into something much bigger. We’re thrilled to see where the open source community can take this project now that it’s out in the wild.

You can read more about the ideas behind Pixelwave in the 5 minute intro to Pixelwave over at the documentation center.

What can I do with it?

Pixelwave is all about creating interactive 2D games and applications that need to be fast and efficient.

If you want to create a clone of Mail, for example, you’re probably better off using UIKit. But if you’re looking to make a real-time hardware-accelerated 2D game, Pixelwave is the right tool for the job.

You can learn more about Pixelwave’s capabilities in the hulky manual.

Who’s using it?

Though the framework is still in its early stages, Pixelwave’s private beta has already produced a couple of App Store games (Sneak Out!, KickBox), some in-development projects, and there’s even a class being taught with it.

What does it come with?

When you download PIxelwave you get:

• The Pixelwave framework.
• The PixelKit framework, which adds useful tools for game developers.
• A bunch of samples to get you started.
• Several useful Xcode templates.
• A complete API reference (Including a native Xcode docset).

And there’s always the documentation center with lots of yummy articles.

And all of this is free?

Yep, it’s available under the (very) permissive zlib license. Why? Because we believe in the power of open source.

In conclusion

This is the start of something pretty big. We have high hopes for this framework and hope you enjoy it as much as we intended you to. So feel free to join the forums, follow us, fork us, tweet about us, and help us get the word out about Pixelwave.

Cheers!