Community Showcase: HyperLap2D
Hey everybody! As announced a few weeks ago we want to give creators of interesting community projects the opportunity to present their exciting libraries or tools on the official blog. This is the fourth of these Community Showcases, in which fgnm is going to present his HyperLap2D!
If you are interested in other cool community projects, be sure to check out the libGDX Awesome List as well. To participate in future showcases, take a look here.
Many libGDX lovers may remember the Overlap2D tool, which was unfortunately discontinued some years ago. HyperLap2D aims to be a modern replacement for this tool.
One serious disadvantage of using a low-level framework, such as libGDX, is that all graphics stuff has to be coded along with the game logic. Sometimes this might be good, but in complex games this aspect quickly becomes slow and annoying, since it forces graphic and level designers to work with code. Usually, developers create their own solutions according to their game needs, however this might be time consuming as well. HyperLap2D is a general-purpose visual editor that helps you describe complex scenes with an easy to use drag and drop UI along with many useful tools. It doesn’t contain any business logic, just a pure description of all graphical assets.
The output is a series of JSON files, completely independent from code, that can be loaded at runtime anywhere: in a standard libGDX project, derivate libGDX works or even in a completely different framework/game engine.
Features
- Images and Sprite Animations
- Box2D Physics World
- Dynamic Lights using box2dLights
- Spine Animation
- Particle Effects
- Talos VFX
- Grouping complex objects into library items
- Import, Export and Share your compositions
- Live Preview
- Custom Tiled Maps
- Built in 9-patch editor
- Actions Node Editor
- Plugins
- Open JSON output
libGDX Runtime
HyperLap2D comes with an official runtime for libGDX, an engine-like library that has everything you need to parse JSON files and work with your scenes.
It’s based on Ashley ECS, with a built-in rendering system, entity factories, tween actions and much more!
The runtime can be used in any type of libGDX project: LWJGL2/3, Android, RoboVM and GWT. Some useful information can be found in the Getting Started wiki and in Working Example.
Development status
Currently, HyperLap2D is in Alpha stage and it’s under heavy development. All features are working and many others will be added soon. However, some aspects might not be stable and there is still a huge room for improvement of the overall system. If you have some cool additions or bug fixes, don’t hesitate to create an issue or a pull request. Any contribution, big or small, is always well received.
Join the official HyperLap2D’s Discord server for friendly discussions and subscribe to the YouTube Channel for further updates.
