Has anyone played with PushButtonEngine?

Question

http://pushbuttonengine.com/

I'd like to know if anyone has experienced any major (particularly performance) issues with the engine. Any heavyweight features we should stay away from?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I've never used the engine, but I've looked through the source code. I have some experience with high performance games in Flash. It's gonna perform well enough for any game simple enough to run on a not-heavily-modified version of PushButton.

That said, the reason there's no performance troubles is that it does really do a whole lot -- it feels like a lot of framework for framework's sake. They have interfaces of interfaces of interfaces for code that, in the end, has two functions that actually do anything even though the call passes through two or three layers to get there. PushButtonEngine does/has hooks for three basic tasks:

1. Loads a file that contains a 'level definition', which is their fancy way of saying "a list of definitions we pass off to Box2D" plus a couple bindings of name <=> art.
2. Puts stuff on the screen.
3. Does physics (again by passing off to Box2D.

Since actually drawing stuff on the screen is easy to implement -- even a high-performance bitmap renderer isn't tough -- all you're getting is the physics stuff, which is all handled by Box2D anyway.

So I'd suggest just downloading Box2D (which performs very well), writing a simple renderer that does just what you need (pushbutton's has hooks for operating in a variety of modes, and all the architectural overhead that comes with that), write a simple data layer that both systems can read, and calling it a day. The time you lose with the duplication of effort you'll save by not having to learn somebody else's way of doing things.

Answer 2

I've explored PushButton in reasonable detail (creating a tutorial series you can find here). I would agree that a good deal of the focus of the engine is focused on creating a component based interface (which probably has as much to do with their commercial component store as it does with creating usable code), which can be a little odd if you have not used such a design pattern before. Once you get over that aspect of the engine it is quite powerful and useful.

Pushbutton allows you to get a simple game up and running without having to worry about a lot of the low level details like resource management, level loading, animation etc. And once the component store becomes popular you may even be able to purchase off the shelf solutions for more complex games.

It is at least as capable as other flash games engines like Flixel, and will save you some time writing you own engine. And at the end of the day it is free, so you can make up your own mind without any commitment.