Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders • Hacker News Board

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#11

Post by arocks » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:32 AM UTC

They could have also included some technical parameters like framerate, memory consumption or battery usage for the sake of comparison.

Even if all browsers gain universal support for HTML5, we must remember that Flash can exist outside browsers. A lot of flash games are in circulation which are simply embedded inside Office documents. The actual Flash standalone runtime is only a few megabytes in size. Flash content is highly compressed and very efficiently packed.

In other words, the problem is not Flash per se, it is the Adobe runtime of Flash. Just like Google changed the browser game by introducing an extremely efficient browser, someone can (in theory) develop a mobile friendly, efficient (and open source) runtime. Flash format quite close to the ideal for games.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#12

Post by coffeeaddicted » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:34 AM UTC

fjarlq wrote: post #4

Two problems with the HTML5 version in Chrome: 1) No audio 2) If my mouse cursor moves off the window it loses control of the ship Flash version has neither of these problems. No idea why audio is broken. I tried a couple HTML5 audio test pages and it works there. I'm using Chrome beta 26.0.1410.28 on both Windows 7 and OSX Lion, broken on both. I didn't notice any other differences.

Exact same problems in Firefox. Also background scrolling in flash was somewhat smoother.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#13

Post by brazzy » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:44 AM UTC

antihero wrote: post #2

HTML5 version ran WAY faster for me (Chromium Linux) but without sound :(

To me (Firefox on Windows 7), Flash seemed a little more responsive, but not radically so.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#14

Post by wladimir » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:45 AM UTC

arocks wrote: post #11

They could have also included some technical parameters like framerate, memory consumption or battery usage for the sake of comparison. Even if all browsers gain universal support for HTML5, we must remember that Flash can exist outside browsers. A lot of flash games are in circulation which are simply embedded inside Office documents. The actual Flash standalone runtime is only a few megabytes in size. Flash content…

someone can (in theory) develop a mobile friendly, efficient (and open source) runtime

I don't think the format is documented to that level. And even if it is, it is very complex and hard to get right for other implementations (and it is a moving target controlled by one player, a bit like MS office formats).

And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free implementations available? Or as you're implementing your own environment anyway, go completely native?

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#15

Post by synor » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:53 AM UTC

I lost mouse focus a couple of times by moving the pointer out of the browser window in the HTML5 version which lead to multiple game deaths. This didn't happen with the flash version. Is there some technical barrier in browsers preventing complete mouse capturing?

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#16

Post by evadne » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:54 AM UTC

Reminds me of GreenSock TweenLite and indeed they’re using it for the timeline. http://www.greensock.com/

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#17

Post by lucian1900 » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 10:58 AM UTC

arocks wrote: post #11

They could have also included some technical parameters like framerate, memory consumption or battery usage for the sake of comparison. Even if all browsers gain universal support for HTML5, we must remember that Flash can exist outside browsers. A lot of flash games are in circulation which are simply embedded inside Office documents. The actual Flash standalone runtime is only a few megabytes in size. Flash content…

There already are several open source flash runtimes, but neither is complete enough.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#18

Post by goggles99 » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 11:01 AM UTC

Game ran like complete garbage in HTML5 (Firefox 19, Windows7 i7 2600, 12GB ram). It had a very low framerate, did not respond to mouse in a timely fashion and had no sound. Ran completely smooth and flawless in Flash. Isn't progress (HTML5) great.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#19

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 11:01 AM UTC

Flash version won't start for me, FF19 on Ubuntu with Flash 11,2,202,270.

Re: Flash vs HTML - Waste Invaders

#20

Post by pbhjpbhj » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 11:04 AM UTC

wereHamster wrote: post #8

doomlaser wrote: post #6

The performance of the HTML5 version is smooth and quite impressive, but HTML5's achilles heel is sound. I didn't have any audio. This game aside, I still haven't played an HTML5 game with audio that wasn't plagued by high latency / other funkiness.

Sadly Firefox doesn't support the WebAudio API, only an older audio API. The WebAudio API was designed primarily by Google and is very nice. It's only supported by Chrome AFAIK. Last year at Google IO they had a talk about it. We use the API in our game, and it works great.

browserquest.mozilla.org managed to do sound OK.