Decide Pixi.js or Phaser

Kuan picture Kuan · Jul 21, 2016 · Viewed 31.9k times · Source

All:

One of my school project is to make a realtime multiplayers webpage game, I am currently having difficulty to decide if I should go Pixi.js or Phaser for the game graphic and control, could anyone talk a little bit about what they are good at and better that each other?

Thanks

Answer

Kamen Minkov picture Kamen Minkov · Jul 22, 2016

Phaser uses Pixi for rendering, albeit an older and heavily modified version of it. Current versions of Pixi may give you better performance, but you'll have to implement by hand what's readily available in Phaser.

They are different by that Pixi is a rendering engine and Phaser is a game framework.

I'll quote Rich, the creator of Phaser:

Off the top of my head, here is what Phaser adds onto Pixi:

  • Choice of physics systems (arcade or full body)
  • A Game World and a Camera which can pan around it
  • Tilemap support
  • A particle system
  • Sound support (both web audio and legacy audio)
  • More advanced input handling (input priority, drag and drop, etc)
  • Keyboard and Gamepad inputs
  • Scale Manager to handle game / scene resizing + full screen support
  • Tween Manager for tweening game objects, hooked into the core clock (so it pauses properly when your game does)
  • Asset loader (supporting all kinds of file types) and Cache
  • A State Manager to let you swap between game states easily
  • Game clock + custom timers + timer events

And probably lots more I forgot. As someone has commented though, it depends entirely on what you want to make. Lots of people use Pixi who don't make games at all. However as this is a game dev forum, I'm going to suspect you do :)

I guess just try it. If you don't like it put it down to experience and just use Pixi "raw".

Source: http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/12656-phaser-pixi/#comment-72893

Depending on how much you can wait, you may actually wait to try Phaser 3 (Lazer), which is currently in the works, and will have its own rendering engine. I think, however, that learning the current version of Phaser is a good starting point, and many things in Lazer will be the same.