What are the benefits & differences between OPEN & LIME?

this is just a general question really. but since using OPENFL for about 2/3 weeks now and loving it, there are still some questions. mainly regarding things like LIME & OPENFL.
what is the difference between them?
whilst i could hazard a guess and say that LIME would be for X and OPENFL is for Y. ikind of think that may be wrong, due to seeing people who are using 1 or the other.

• but what is the benefit of using LIME over OPENFL and visa-versa?
• which one would be best for certain things?
• also i know that they are really just libraries and you can mix and match with HAXE [which is damn cool], but one library must do one thing better than the other. right?

guess this could be used as a future new user post as well, so new-comers to OPENFL and/or LIME can at least see what the differences are :wink:

thanks

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Lime is much lower level than OpenFL.

If you are comfortable using OpenGL then Lime can be much more flexible and you don’t have to stick to the Flash API. You can use things like shaders and framebuffers which are hidden by OpenFL. You can also define your own rendering routines much easier than in OpenFL. You can use OpenGLView in OpenFL but it can be a pain as OpenFL is a bit picky and you have to make sure you put things back as you found them at the end of your render function. With Lime you are left to your own devices.

OpenFL is a step above Lime in that it hides a lot of the complicated rendering code. It still uses Lime to do what it does, it’s just making all of the OpenGL calls for you behind the scenes. It adds a flash-like layer to Lime. Many people know the flash APIs so it’s a welcome thing that those skills can transfer almost immediately to OpenFL.

Usually whether you want to use OpenFL or Lime is down to either your programming background / experience and what you need to do. I found it easier to use Lime when I needed things like render textures but I had to recreate a lot of things that OpenFL provides by default. It’s fun though to see how everything works. :smile:

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cool spot.

thats what i have seen. LIME is more, how can i say it, thorough with what you can do. the deep nitty gritty of using HAXE in a cerative way.
really nice looking, and actually a great option as well. rather than just sticking with one or the other, i can mix and match. which is a lovely feeling :wink:

i did know some AS2, way back when. but am back now to just learn HAXE/OPENFL, maybe LIME if i need it :wink:

but from what i have seen OPENFL does wrap things up in more digestible bites. which is good :wink:

thanks

This is an excellent question, witch I would really like to know more about. If Lime is a basic layer of OpenFl, can an OpenFl application have code for Lime? Meaning that Most of the programming will be Flash-like OpenFl, but the graphics heavy coding will be Lime?
Does Lime has more “stuff” then the graphics API?

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from what i have seen, you can mix them up, because they are just libraries linking to HAXE. i may be wrong, but this is what i have seen with HAXE and its libraries.
thats the beuty of HAXE

Yep, it’s designed so you can use both :slight_smile: