Phaser 0.9.5 Released – Camera FX, lots of Tilemap updates and more!

And here’s Phaser 0.9.5 🙂 A lot has changed in this update. The most fundamental updates include:

New FXManager

In previous versions, as in Flixel, camera effects like shake, flash and fade were all bundled into the main Camera class. This has now changed. A new project, Special FX was created and all of the effects moved there. A Camera now has an fx property to which you can register any number of effects that you want. The effects are also compiled to their own js file (phaser-fx.js), so if you don’t need to use any of them in your game you can save some extra bytes. The Camera class is now a lot smaller and faster as a result too. It also allowed us to add in new effects, so feel free to play with the Camera Scanlines and Camera Mirror effects 🙂

In a future version we’ll adopt use of the FXManager for other game objects, not just cameras.

Lots of Tilemap Updates

Tilemaps have really been given an adrenalin boost in this update. For example collision with them is now much more flexible. You get a list of all colliding tiles returned (not just a boolean), you can control if a tile should cause separation if an object collides with it or not and finally set your own collision callbacks.

As well as this we added a lot of map data manipulation commands. For example replaceTile will scan the map (or a region of it that you define), replacing all instances of a specific tile for another. There is also swapTile, fillTiles, putTile, randomiseTiles and new methods to get tile data. You could now easily create an in-game tile editor should you wish. The above screen shot is from one of the new tests showing putTile in action.

Boot and Pause Screens

Phaser has always had a built-in boot and pause screen. Before they were bundled into the Stage class, but have since moved into their own area (system/screens) making them much easier for you to customise as you see fit, and also keeping Stage cleaner as a result.

TypeScript declarations

The project is now generating TypeScript declaration files. This was important to get the new SpecialFX library working and we’ve updated all of the test suite to use them. Basically it means you can now start a fresh TypeScript project and just copy in the lib.d rather than all the source for the whole framework. Of course if you’re coding using JavaScript this means nothing to you 🙂

As well as the above there are lots of bug fixes, thanks to the support of devs reporting issues on github. Please do keep them coming.

I’ll be away for most of next week in LA at Adobe Max, so 0.9.6 will be at least 3 weeks away, but it will focus heavily on expanding the Input handling.

Check out Phaser on this site, or direct on github.

Posted on May 2nd 2013 at 2:02 pm by Rich.
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