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Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

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Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#71

Post by AshleysBrain »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #69
AshleysBrain wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't bother - Crosswalk does the job great for Android: https://crosswalk-project.org/ It's based on Chrome for Android so you have a fully-featured browser engine available. iOS is the only platform where there isn't a good GPU-accelerated browser engine available that can run native apps, hence the use case. (P.S. we hope to support Ejecta in Construct 2 officially soon!)

Wait, Chrome? With its horribly slow 2D acceleration and aliasing? Why would you want that for your game?

Chrome for Android has GPU-accelerated 2D canvas and WebGL support now, and it's great for browser games! Probably the best mobile browser in fact.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#72

Post by thatnodeguy »

The problem with flash is the same problem as the .Net framework, Coldfusion and similar technologies.

You cannot have an entire ecosystem revolve around a single company and not have growth or compatibility problems. You simply can't.

What flourishes? Things like Linux, Python, etc because they can be flexible and adaptable. When you have a company in charge of a technology you will always be at the whim of that company and what they decide to do with it.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#73

Post by PhasmaFelis »

larsiusprime wrote: post #68
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did. I may not have been clear, though. He says HTML5 is a poor substitute for Flash because it doesn't work for "high-performance desktop-ready games for Steam." I'm saying that Flash has never been any good for "high-performance desktop-ready games," and devs really, really need to stop deluding themselves that it is. Basically I'm saying I have trouble trusting anyone who thinks that Flash was ever a decent high…

I get that. (I wrote the article by the way). "I have trouble trusting anyone who thinks that Flash was ever a decent high-performance gaming engine" I never said it was -- just that if I have to switch to something anyways, performance is something I want to take into account. And for what it's worth, flash wasn't high performance, but with proper optimization you could get acceptable performance -- and in the case…

That makes more sense, then. I've been burned a couple of times buying games on Steam by devs who thought Flash was good enough for pro development. (IIRC, both of them either got or are getting a non-Flash remake.) And I've been frustrated by the slowness of Flash web games pretty much since it was launched, until just a few years ago when I was able to afford high-end gaming rigs. So it's a hot button for me.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#74

Post by ojii »

ANTSANTS wrote: post #57
ojii wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, as far as I know there's still no decent solution to stream video without flash (I'm talking Twitch et al here). Twitch is the only reason I still have flash on my computer (and not actually for watching games being streamed, but for the annual Desertbus event). Has the HTML5 video streaming improved at all over the past year?

I also kept Flash around mainly for this reason. It doesn't help people that want to make streaming video sites, but you don't need Flash to watch live video streams from sites like twitch.tv. You just need a media player capable of playing streaming video (mpc-hc, mpv, and vlc all work), and the livestreamer command line tool which extracts direct video stream URLs from twitch.tv pages. http://livestreamer.readthedo…

I am aware of the VLC workaround. But I like Twitch enough that I'll actually watch their ads, as I think they're reasonably placed etc. So until they're implementing a flash-free solution (and I'm sure they're interested in doing so), I'll just keep flash around for them.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#75

Post by octopus »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #69
AshleysBrain wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't bother - Crosswalk does the job great for Android: https://crosswalk-project.org/ It's based on Chrome for Android so you have a fully-featured browser engine available. iOS is the only platform where there isn't a good GPU-accelerated browser engine available that can run native apps, hence the use case. (P.S. we hope to support Ejecta in Construct 2 officially soon!)

Wait, Chrome? With its horribly slow 2D acceleration and aliasing? Why would you want that for your game?

From my own experience Crosswalk gives you about 60 fps for simple canvas based games on Android 4.3 and 4.4. It is an interesting framework to use.

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#76

Post by nubbee »

IanCal wrote: post #51
tbrock wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, the open source community made a better flash than Adobe did? That is rather amazing considering the resources of the respective groups.

They've done it twice. MotionTwin did a lot of work in AS2 so they built a better compiler for it (MTASC), which compiled faster and made faster swfs (it's still used in production at the BBC). Then when AS3 came out they seem to have thought "Oh come on!" given the quality of the compiler and language features so they built a better language. Again, faster and better compilation, as well as properly implemented thin…

Great example of this; adobe released alchemy[1] a couple years back with which you could compile very basic c/c++ code to a "swic" library which could then be referenced in flash. Although initially free to try adobe wanted to turn this into a premium feature[2]. It was quickly reverse engineered and turned into a haxe api, that made the step of using basic c/c++ and compiling it to a swic obsolete, keeping everything nicely in the haxe ecosystem[3]. If that was not impressive enough they did the same thing with "pixelbender3d"[4] and created hxsl[5].

[1] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/ [2] http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/09/updates-from-the-... [3] http://ncannasse.fr/blog/virtual_memory_api [4] http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pixelbender.html [5] http://ncannasse.fr/blog/announcing_hxsl

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#77

Post by npsimons »

I like haXe, I really do, but for me, it's seriously lacking in libraries. It's all well and good to have everything you need to make games and displace Flash (everywhere!), but for instance, I can't just clone a GPX parser (https://github.com/tkrajina/gpxpy), pull in some other Python mapping stuff (http://sensitivecities.com/so-youd-like-to-make-a-map-using-...) and frontend it with another cross platform "language" (http://kivy.org/).

Big thanks and congratulations to the haXe developers, and I'll keep an eye on it with high hopes the library will expand!

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#78

Post by oscargrouch »

mercer wrote: post #37
leccine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why security conscious people don't use flash. Html is supposed to be a document and not an application. We created this Frankenstein with Flash, Java and JS to make HTML pages appear other than documents. The net result is that you need to install these plugins otherwise you can't get the full experience. The real question is why do we let people to abuse technology instead of using it well. I have d…

> The real question is why do we let people to abuse technology instead of using it well. I am (still!) amazed by the gap between how I see a computer and how most non-geeks around me do. To them, it's like a set of different, often frustrating tools rather than, well, an amazing piece of technology that can be prodded to do whatever you want (to the point where an iPad with few to no apps can provide them with all t…

Or we might look the other way around and see that the "technologists" are the ones to blame for not make things easear for non-tech people..

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are masters here, and little to no one newcomers learn some good usability and simplicity lessons from them.. the complexity in tech are only getting worse, and eventually will require "saviors", wich are the ones people will praise for, and the tools people will use..

Notepads and Excels, not Emacs or Bash .. so its not the users that are the ones to blame.. we are.. The elistist geeks who think that everybody else should be a geek.. not savages

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#79

Post by Egregore »

aiurtourist wrote: post #21

> OpenFL is an implementation of the Flash API written in the Haxe programming language. Other than "Papers Please," who is using Haxe for production (i.e., making money on products built with it), and for what?

Here are some showcases:

http://www.openfl.org/showcase/

http://haxeflixel.com/showcase/

Also we're waiting for our educational game to be approved by Apple app-store, and will make an announcement when it's done. :)

Re: Flash is dead, long live OpenFL

#80

Post by Egregore »

Macuyiko wrote: post #22

Every time I read an article about Haxe (and now, OpenFL), I get the itch to start working on a mobile game--just as a hobby project. That said, does anyone know how well-suited these frameworks are for regular application development (or whether there exists alternatives)? I've been thinking about wipping up a mobile app, and while I could write the Android code, my knowledge of Objective-C is so limited at the mome…

There are two UI libraries for openfl, HaxeUI and Stablex:

http://haxeui.org/

https://github.com/RealyUniqueName/StablexUI

btw: There is Objective C target in haxe, so you can develop native apps for iOS in Haxe.

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