Metro GUI and SAT2D + differential equations

[mattqual]

I am very much a fan of the Metro design in Windows 8.1 and would like to apply it to my game.

(Mimmick)

The first issue to getting there is the font. Segoe UI (including its Light weight) is a commercial font owned by Microsoft; so, although I run Windows 10, I can't embed a copy of the Segoe UI font in my game. So I am thinking of building a font called Silverhoney using the FontForge application and exporting a TTF.

Other than the font, I'm still deciding which technology I'll use to develop my game. Here are my descriptions of what I've already tried before:

Godot Engine

Godot Engine is where I tried ultra hard in this game. I tried mixing WebSocket, JSON, its 2D physics, and maybe even tried to either 1) keep Godot Engine as a server side and HTML5 as a client side, or 2) keep Node.js as a server side and HTML5 as a client side.

It was not succeeding for some reasons:

• Perhaps the automobile wasn't well programmed as of my part due to confusion with $sin$ and $cos$ as I was trying to mimmick a specific Flash game by reverse engineering its ActionScript 3 code through FFDec.
• The automobile was sliding in a unexpected form.
• The WebSocket server (in Godot Engine case) was crashing depending on how I managed peers.
• There were GUI issues regarding the Godot Engine client side.

HTML5 client side + Node.js server side

• It was a mess. The GUI was sort of working well in the Next.js framework, but there were issues in both sides.
• The Node.js server side could not be implemented in TypeScript for some reasons (like TypeScript version conflict); but I am not sure whether this was one of the initial problems I had (I think I had it later in a Fortoresse XY project).
• The HTML5 client side had a very weak display list API. I could not do blur, RGBA channels distortion, effects, and lots more. I tried tweaking over EaselJS, Two.js, ... and nothing has gone well. EaselJS was sort of not fitting into the programming API due to architecture requirements. For Two.js I tried to apply, in a recursive form, simple transformations over its drawn graphics using EaselJS or something and it didn't work.
• I tried using Pixi.js and it did not work because my game was using a letterbox scale and the automobile was partially clipped off for some reason (some WebGL algorithm problem, I think).
• I tried different things in the server side for dealing with the 2D physics, and it ended not going well.

Unreal Engine

I don't know how to use Unreal Engine (1.5%), but I know SVG support are commercial extensions you have to pay, and Unreal C++ is the only free-form language so far (Verse has been announced as part of Unreal Engine 6 (which comes years later), but I'm not sure).

For building GUIs in Unreal Engine, you use the Slate architecture, which is a drawing-oriented programming interface and set of C++ macro definitions for inserting controls.

Adobe AIR

Things that prevented me from going through Adobe AIR are:

• It is not exactly easy to setup a new Adobe AIR project. You have to worry about providing build scripts yourself (whether a Batch or Bash script, whether an Ant script, whether a Maven project file). You have to manually locate the SWF or SWC output; you have to manually locate the libraries SWCs input; among few other configurations.
• ASDoc configuration is also problematic
• Apache Flex is probably not a priority (it is not very common); but Apache Royale is something I have never used at all, but I've found it exists like ~6 or 5 years ago)
• My problem with Apache Royale is that it still isn't exactly the easy thing to setup.
• In the past I've always thought of Adobe AIR having a build system like Cargo's build system, which shifted me off of ActionScript 3 by entirety.

I really do not know where I'd start, but if I used Adobe AIR both in client side and server side, I'd need to:

• Build a new Foam (a 2D physics engine using SAT 2D for collision testing and perhaps something like Runge Kutta for differential equations).
• Build the Metro component set and the Metro theme.
• Communicate with a database (MySQL for example)
• Communicate with Google Captcha

Appreciate if anyone can hint at what I can use for that game.