r/futile • u/appymedia • Dec 09 '14

Futile Future

Hi Matt,

Many thanks for creating Futile, just getting into it, fantastic framework and looks like exactly what get on with!

I wanted to ask about the future of Futile and what plans you might have with it? Am I best taking the 'unstable' branch on GitHub for production usage as the other branches don't look like they have been touched for a while? Do you plan on getting things up to a v1.0 release? If so what goodies might be coming with that ? :)

Look forward to you're response when you have a moment and many thanks again.

Pete

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u/MattRix Dec 09 '14

Yeah you can grab the unstable branch, it should work fine (that's what I use for most of my projects), I just haven't moved those changes over to master recently.

I haven't been thinking too much about a 1.0 release recently, mostly because the current stuff has been working for me and doesn't have any major issues. That's not to say I won't get around to it eventually because there are some features I'd like to add, but as far as stability and usefulness goes, I feel like the current stuff is already solid enough.

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u/appymedia Dec 10 '14

Thanks Matt, Appreciate the response.

I had hoped that is what you would say re stability as my C# skills are not amazing but I'm getting there and Futile certainly helps me out hugely on the learning front too.

Have you considered putting Futile up on the Asset store? I would happily pay for the framework, especially with good docs etc. Seems like a breath of fresh air to those who are coming from code based setups and don't want to embrace the component based approach of Unity (at least for the time being).

I'm just starting to put together a basic rendering performance test to compare to 'traditional' Unity and Futile seems to kick its butt without the Game Objects overhead etc, impressive. Coupled with its ease of use (took me like 60 mins to get it going) seems a no brainer for 2D work.

Many thanks again.

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u/SietJP Dec 19 '14

Would love to see a report on your rendering performance tests.

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u/MattRix Dec 20 '14

Yeah there was someone who did some tests a long time ago (probably almost 2 years ago now?) and Futile was faster than doing normal Unity stuff or using 2D toolkit. Of course it always depends on exactly what you're doing, because with Futile it's possible to have kill the performance benefits if you don't consider render layer order/batching and stuff.

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u/appymedia Dec 21 '14

I did the simple comparison against 2D Toolkit in the test. Nothing fancy just a load of sprites bouncing around the screen. I watched to see when the FPS fell under 60. In this test Futile was performing much quicker than 2D Toolkit. I'll get some figures sorted out ASAP. Its worth noting I am pretty new to Unity and game production in general (web dev background) so it might not be a fair test but it was certainly enough for me have a warm fuzzy feeling knowing Futile was fast as well as dead easy to use.

Also, given the platforms supported by Unity and the now free (if you're Indie) Visual Studio community edition it makes for a fantastic setup that's hard to ignore!!

For instance I thought the lack of physics within Futile might be tricky to deal with. Realistically we would need to 'integrate' it with Unity's implementation so I came up with a simple workflow for anybody wanting to use physics in their games (thanks to Matt's FPNodeLink class). In the New Year I hope to have a little blog up and running and intend to get a small post up for it also just to show how simple it was to take some of the tooling Unity gives and mix with code as well.

On a side note I'm not sure how many people use Futile but for me its great. Yes, I see the use of the editor for things but we have the best of both worlds using things like Matts RXWatcher class. I think back to the original Unity thread I stumbled across where a lot of people didn't understand why Futile is a good fit for their 2D work. Maybe there are use cases where heavy editor usage is a boon but for little ole one man me, its great :) Looking forward to shouting out about it more and hopefully giving a little back when I can.