What is Flash Game Programming
From GMpedia.org Wiki
| This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet GMpedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article, especially its categories, and wiki-links. |
[edit] I want to be a game programmer!
Most of todays commercially popular games are huge monsters that are deployed on several CD's or on DVD, feature tons of high quality graphics and music and have the latest top notch 3D engine that allows all kinds of freedom.
If you want to develop such games then I'm sorry, you are wrong here, please move along to a more suitable site like The Game Programming Wiki or gamedev.net! However if you want to develop interesting 2D games with unusual ideas or if you want to be the new Andrew Braybrook who writes a swift Uridium Flash clone then don't move, stay where you are, you are absolutely right here!
If you are already familiar with Flash I don't need to explain you the pro's and con's of it but if you're new to it let me explain quickly what Flash is good for and what not ...
Pro's:
- Compact. Flash's format keeps a compact size and is especially useful for the web (but not limited to it). Also the programming style with Actionscript is very compact. The native movieclip structure makes it possible to handle graphical elements with ease and it takes few lines of code to get things moving.
- Platform independence. Flash movies run on the most common platforms like Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Many mobile devices like cellphones and PDA's support Flash Lite (a limited version of Flash) and recently some of them even support full Flash MX support (like the Wilcom WX310K).
Con's:
- No native Hardware support. to maintain platform independence and compactness Flash sacrifices DirectX support and therefore it isn't really the choice for fast 3D graphics. There is limited DirectX support by using some third party tools like mdm Zinc or swfXXL but these are usually to display the movie on a DirectX screen resolution to improve the framerate. Currently I have no information if Flash will ever support hardware accelerated graphics support like OpenGL and while it would be unexpected it would surely be a welcome feature that would once again unlock a whole lot of new possibilities.
Game programming with Flash in short means to create interactive games either for deployment on the web but also for offline use and installment to the users hard disk.
Flash is an ideal environment to develop video games of the two dimensional nature. That said it is still possible to create limited but interesting three dimensional content with Flash.
Flash games can be written by using the commercial Flash IDE but since a while it is possible to use open source tools like the AS2.0 compiler MTASC, SWFMill, the Eclipse IDE with ASDT or any other additions of the ever growing open source pool to create them.
