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Is Superpowers active?

A topic by Vallar created Feb 24, 2017 Views: 1,848 Replies: 9
Viewing posts 1 to 6

Hey everyone,

I have been looking around for game engines to replace Unity for web based game projects and I came across Superpowers a while back. I quickly glanced at the download page and saw that the last version seems to be announced on October 31st last year yet the download page for 0.4 mentions the file was uploaded on April 2016. Aside from that confusion, is Superpowers being actively worked on? Or is that it?

I eventually would like to make multiplayer games (so far been only doing single player 2D). Do you guys think this is a good engine to jump into with that goal in mind? Or should I just look else where?

Thanks a lot!

Ok, i'm not part of the core developers so the following is just the personal perception:

Right now i wouldn't say it is active neither dead, it's just that Superpowers since it is not a commercial product (meaning they not have a profit directly from it) it cant be maintained in the same way of other engines (like Unity), but on the other hand as an open source project anyone can clone its code and continue working on it and with that in mind i wouldn't say its easy to kill (but not imposible).

About multiplayer, Superpowers has a socket.io client library built in, so the hardest part should be how to setup the server.

If Superpowers is a good engine or not depends on your need, the only scenario where i wouldn't recommend Superpowers is if whe where talking about 3D games and i will fault webGL for that.

Thank you very much for your reply.

I completely understand that it is a free engine so development wouldn't be a priority like Unity. That said, there are other engines that have quite active development and are free (Godot and PhaserJS come to mind). But again, I am not faulting the developers, if I were in their shoes I would do the same. I just don't want to jump into something to only find out it was abandoned. Yes, it is open source so anyone (including me) could just continue working on it but my experience is far inferior to even think of attempting that any time soon.

" i wouldn't recommend Superpowers is if whe where talking about 3D games and i will fault webGL for that" -- I am not sure if I understand correctly, does Superpowers not export a native WebGL/HTML5 game? Why would 3D in WebGL be any problem? PlayCanvas seems to do it well and so is BabylonJS for example. At least to my knowledge. Unless Superpowers' web export is similar to Unity's WebGL export?

Well, my experience is mostly on Android devices and that's why i wouldn't recommend Superpowers for 3D development since WebGl support is still buggy there. Also there is a personal feeling about webgl being only an experiment and not a real standard, so its not comparable to work with godot or UE4 (but that might just be nonsenses of a loosed mind).

I see. Well even on mobile it should run good at least if it was exported well. It is a bit concerning however. That said, I am targeting 2D at the moment so I don't think it would be affecting me for a while. Although I hope the Supperpowers devs would fix it either way.

(2 edits) (+1)

I sent email to SuperPowers team some days ago and still I have not received a response.
In spite of all they should not abandon this project.
Ideally, they need an investor.

I wouldn't go as far as "shouldn't". At the end of the day it is more or less a hobby project now (even if they consider it otherwise). There is no money involved after all. But as you mentioned ideally an investor would turn this around

(+1)

Well.... Superpowers is considered "completed" project and is kinda usable, however the HTML5/Browser environment is ever-changing what works today may generate error tomorrow.....

The real benefit is that it's fully open sourced, so anyone can pick and fork it to fix up a working version if you wish. If Superpowers has a chance to go Steam, will drastically make it alive again, but it really depends on the devs. Currently, they're just too busy to to this.

"but on the other hand as an open source project anyone can clone its code and continue working on it and with that in mind i wouldn't say its easy to kill (but not imposible)."
that is not an criteria, if i create an 0 bytes text document, and distribute it online, techinicaly its an open source document that does nothing.

any one can download and add new features and give it an purpose, but that dont means its alive, if it dont have maintainers, for all intentes and purposes its dead.

any one can fork it, but having too many programs (forks) with the same name maybe confusing and the name may end up changint to avoid harm the reputation if someone make an malicious code with the name. (so the name may be an brand copyrighted)

if you cant add new features yourself, take a look at the github and click on the number at the right of "forks" see what fork is active, and as long as there is at least 1, its alive.

the oficial branch may acept patches from it on the future or not, in the mean time you can use one of the forks.



"HTML5/Browser environment is ever-changing what works today may generate error tomorrow....."
nope, the specs for html5 has been complete, now w3c is working on html6 i guess.

i any case, as long as they didnt use something in draft stage, things should work forever.
HTML will get new features but the old ones will keep working (except the draft ones as i said before)


A friendly mention is, if you're really using FireFox or Chrome, they have break many things between releases, it sounds stupid but as a web/ethernet system maintainer I have done countless changes sine the first version pharma consult of my company (and the company I working on is a pharmaceutical company, for personally my income 7500.USD/per month, I assume my 20% of day work are dealing that over and over, not easy money).

For me the best part of open source things are the re-usability of the code and idea, if someone think it's dead, let it go. The're many ppl here and there, and some are helpful, some are miserable, it really depends on how you understand, so...... have fun.