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Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

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Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#11

Post by TomGullen »

> I could try HTML5, but that precludes releasing high-performance desktop-ready games for Steam.

We develop Construct 2 (https://www.scirra.com) which is an HTML5 game engine. It can export to EXE via Node Webkit with very good performance, as well as the ability to export a multitude of mobile platforms as well.

One game we're excited to see released in the near future made in Construct 2 is "Penelope": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaynOYy2O54

The author is developing this game in Construct 2 for PC/Mac/Linux.

Some of our users have also submitted their games to Greenlight, here's a couple:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=184459...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=929949...

These are all HTML5 games!

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#13

Post by troymc »

camus2 wrote: post #5

Flash is the plateform and the IDE, and nothing will replace the IDE regarding how easy to create and organise animations. Sure,you can code in a text editor, But a designer cant do precise and complex animations with a text editor. Editing and creating animations are 50% of the value of Flash and that's why the IDE is still necessary to develop games, wether they are HTML5 or mobile ones. Yes there is Unity but Unit…

Check out Stencyl 3.0+ [1]. It's a GUI game-creation toolkit and IDE with a game runtime written in Haxe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stencyl

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#14

Post by thefreeman »

camus2 wrote: post #5

Flash is the plateform and the IDE, and nothing will replace the IDE regarding how easy to create and organise animations. Sure,you can code in a text editor, But a designer cant do precise and complex animations with a text editor. Editing and creating animations are 50% of the value of Flash and that's why the IDE is still necessary to develop games, wether they are HTML5 or mobile ones. Yes there is Unity but Unit…

Did you even read the article? you can keep using the Flash authoring tool and its native flash vector animations if you like

And the "dead" from the title refers to support from Adobe. The entire post is about how you can still target flash using OpenFL, haxe, etc.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#15

Post by andybak »

sdfjkl wrote: post #7

It's not Flash that is dead, it's the whole concept of browser plugins. Too risky, too inconvenient, too often installed and then forgotten, never to receive security updates (or those that exist aren't installed because they prompt us about it far too often).

I'm not disagreeing but your comment makes it sound like you think OpenFL is still plugin based?

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#16

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

TomGullen wrote: post #11

> I could try HTML5, but that precludes releasing high-performance desktop-ready games for Steam. We develop Construct 2 ( https://www.scirra.com ) which is an HTML5 game engine. It can export to EXE via Node Webkit with very good performance, as well as the ability to export a multitude of mobile platforms as well. One game we're excited to see released in the near future made in Construct 2 is "Penelope": https://w…

Another example is ImpactJS, which allows you to write high-performance mobile-ready games!

http://impactjs.com/

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#17

Post by slacka »

For those not familiar with OpenFL, /u/larsiusprime posted a nice summary of how it's used:

"OpenFL is is a programming API that mirrors the Flash API, but in the Haxe language. So you take your old ActionScript code and port it over to Haxe (very similar language, but with additional features). Then you also take your Flash-vector-art SWF files, and you load it with the Haxe SWF library. OpenFL ensures you can still make all the same method calls to the Flash API, etc.

When you compile, you select one of many targets, kinda like unity: C++, JavaScript, etc. It conveniently packages those targets up into special configurations like "Android", "Windows", "HTML5", "Linux", etc.

So you can take your existing flash code and art, but get it running NATIVELY, in say, Linux desktop, with no need for the flash plugin or AIR runtime -- it's just a C++ app that does the same stuff (and much faster!)

You can also output to HTML5 so your players don't need the flash plugin anymore (the HTML5 target is still fairly new). As an end user, there's nothing for you to really do, except to wait for flash developers to switch over to it. From your perspective, all you'll really see is that instead of Flash apps on the web, there's more HTML5 apps. And instead of AIR apps for games on the desktop, they're natively compiled for Linux. What happened in these cases is that the developers were using Flash before but switched to OpenFL."

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#19

Post by larsiusprime »

slacka wrote: post #17

For those not familiar with OpenFL, /u/larsiusprime posted a nice summary of how it's used: "OpenFL is is a programming API that mirrors the Flash API, but in the Haxe language. So you take your old ActionScript code and port it over to Haxe (very similar language, but with additional features). Then you also take your Flash-vector-art SWF files, and you load it with the Haxe SWF library. OpenFL ensures you can still…

Context: I posted that description on the /r/linux_gaming thread to a user who initially thought that OpenFL was a plugin or something and was wondering "what they needed to do" to use it.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#20

Post by anon4 »

So what I got from that is that Haxe is a statically typed javascript with actual honest-to-god macros. Married to a trivially simple 2D graphics and audio framework, that thousands of developers are already familiar with.

That's awesome!

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