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Comment by thomasikzelf | Hacker News Reader

I never used tumult but I think these are the differences:

  - Moos.app has built-in "behaviors" that are sort of a template for interactions. For example the scroller behavior allows you to put text next to your visuals, when the user then scrolls your visuals will update. It also works on mobile and desktop without additional actions.
  - I found that using SVG or HTML for complex animations is way to slow. That's why moos.app uses a custom WEBGL renderer.
  - Moos.app works in the browser, Tumult is a mac app
  - As Tumult is older it has a bigger community
  - Tumult has no web hosting build in (I think). With moos.app you click a button and you get a link (or a self contained HTML file)
  - Tumult is a one time payment while moos.app is usage-based-pay

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I think the ability to create and animate objects in a 3D space would really set this app apart. I say this as a frequent user of Hype. It's a great app, but limited to 2D animation as what it creates is entirely in CSS3, SVG and JS.

The examples on the website are nice, however from what I saw, they can be done in Hype as well. As you mentioned, Hype is more mature and has a sizable community, many of whom contribute towards extending its functionality by creating custom modules in JS for things like dynamic data imported w/ JSON.

For 3D animation I've also used Spline, which is in beta. It's interesting, but on my 2014 MBP, it runs slowly and the fans are constantly on, which makes it less appealing for my use.

Thank you for your message :-). Can you tell me in which ways you think Hype is more mature?

My app does not currently allow importing JSON, that is something on the roadmap. It does however allow you to send values to your project dynamically if you embed it on a web page. This way you can drive it with javascript.

If you would want to recreate the example from my website in Hype would you need to know code or do you use some kind of plugin?

IMO Hype is similar to Flash and After Effects in that it has a timeline-based GUI that's easy to grasp. So for the generation of Flash developers who were left in the lurch after 2012, it was a great option. It also has a code editor view that allows you to write custom JS for functions that aren't related to animation (e.g. a countdown timer).

It's a pretty niche tool these days as animation on the web is unfortunately rare, and game design has shifted to Unity. Those were Flash's biggest use cases.

From what I've seen, animators today create them in Adobe After Effects, then pass that through a library called Lottie[0] which exports to JSON, and can then be implemented in HTML. That might be the market you could try targeting.

[0] https://airbnb.io/lottie/#/

> - I found that using SVG or HTML for complex animations is way to slow. That's why moos.app uses a custom WEBGL renderer.

Did you try Canvas2D? Also curious to what you used for the 2D rendering, did you do your own implementation?

Yes a previous version was built on canvas2D. For simple things such as a couple of objects moving across the screen it works great. As soon as you start to do fullscreen "camera" movements performance starts to suffer. All images and paths need to be uploaded to the gpu every frame. Maybe the browser optimizes some things but in my tests it was not enough.

The WEBGL renderer in this project is built from scratch because none were available that support SVG and were small enough for regular web pages. It allows me to upload paths and images to the gpu making fullscreen animations a lot more smooth.

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