http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
We'll be competing with millions of Flash game developers soon.
Heads Up Iphone Game Devs
(46 posts) (19 voices)-
Wow, I don't know whether to be happy about this or not. I'm a flash game developer, it's my day job and game development is one of my hobbies. I've published two games in flash ( http://2leet.com/our-games/ ).
On one hand, this is awesome for a flash developer. On the other hand, the main reason I'm excited about developing for iPhone is it gets me away from Flash developers and into a much less saturated market.
The positive, I guess, is my app I'm currently developing is probably 90% completed for flash already. I plan to develop it for iPhone as well and release it on both platforms with some cross promotion. This will make my game development a lot easier.
The good for those of us hoping the app store isn't flooded with a billion crappy games that could cause our games to get unnoticed is you still have to get the developer license... and you need a mac.
Also, hopefully adobe will do something that requires A LEGAL PURCHASED copy of Flash to be associated with all apps.
I guess we'll see where this goes from here.
Posted 2 years ago # -
vutronic
MemberYep, I think, if you can actually build native iphone apps with Flash, the Iphone game market will turn out to be just like the Flash online game market where 99% of the games are ad driven and free. Apple will loose money too. This also have a huge impact on the Cocos2d Framework. It's alot easier to learn Flash and Actionscript then Cocos2d and Objective-c.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Well, it's already headed that way, and a lot of the flash game dev's are already porting to iPhone. Fact is, even at 99 cents you're likely to make more in the iPhone world than in the flash world.
Either way, I'll be interested to see the practicality of this. For instance, bitmap textures in flash allocate memory for each instance displayed on the screen. That's very, very wasteful, and while you can get away with that on a PC with gigs of ram and virtual memory, not so much on a handheld. So I'd imagine they'd need to re-write a lot of their (crappy, IMO) architecture to make this really work well. Not to mention flash is incredibly slow compared to native apps, because as it currently stands it draws everything entirely in software. My best guess is that they simply draw the vectors in the flash files using native drawing routines, which is going to be many times slower than drawing things with openGL.
So while I'm excited by the prospect, call me skeptical of this being viable for games more complex than match-3's and spot the difference. Either Adobe would have to re-write most of the flash player, or it's going to be slow/limited.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Nah, we're already deluged with thousands of BS apps, it's not going to make a difference if you throw a few more on the pile. Given the likely restrictions here, I don't expect much competition for the high end due to the arrival of flash. For certain types of games it might make the web->iPhone conversion really easy, but for most it likely won't be so simple.
I think the main thing here is that they found a way to get flash on the phone without violating apples walled garden. This is actually a good thing for us, because if you could just open your iPhone browser to Kongregate and start playing, that would ruin the market. But in this case, you still have to go through the app store, so if anything they get to compete with us with a more crippled platform.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I'd personally like to see it succeed; I'm comfortable in either tool, and there's some great code in the flash world (and some things it does easier than in OpenGL) - but I really doubt it'll have the performance you'd need to make it a viable replacement.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I agree, it's outrageously laggy. I find it kind of funny that when you watch the video they state that the iPhone doesn't have the power of common computers and therefore everything must be optimized. iPhone apps are far superior to flash apps in speed from my testing. I can't even begin to do 3D with Flash at the level I can with iPhone.
So if you want to test for yourselves the lag, check out Little Red Riding Hood in the app store. It's not obviously laggy as it's a simple game. However, compare the transitions between scenes from the flash version and the iPhone version and you'll see exactly how laggy it is.
If this is the speed of Flash developed apps for the iPhone, they'll be very few games of quality coming from Flash.
Flash version of Red:
http://differencegames.com/PlayGame.action?gameCode=redhoodiPhone Version:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=331140070&mt=8Posted 2 years ago # -
@Par agree, but by now we all can speculate, by my self i don´t think this be a problem, 1000 flash developers puting your games at apple store not gonna change the actual way this work, good games always gonna sell more, and crappy games, made fast and without a good gameplay gonna lost in this sea of applications
Posted 2 years ago # -
shadaz
MemberI dont like the idea only because it will open doors for 1 million flash developers to put more crapware in the appstore. I see alot of good games get lost in a sea of crap and this will only add fuel to the fire. Im sure 10% of the flash apps will be high end apps that will be good, but imagine all the millions of flash games now competing with your cocos2d game. When I say compete its not just comparing the game itself, but the exposure you get on new releases etc. It will also bog down review time because everyone with a flash .fla will be recompiling into an .ipa and submit for review. so now the 2 week - 1 month review time will be even longer.
Posted 2 years ago # -
vutronic; Yes, they are talking about compiling to a native format; but the renderer in flash is software based and is quite slow compared to a hardware based renderer. Apparently they will let you cache vectors as bitmaps and draw them using openGL in some fashion, which will help, but that initial rendering will almost certainly be software based. This is, in essence, exactly what CoreGraphics and UIKit do; and if you've tried to build a game in those technologies, you'll quickly find it's much slower than native openGL rendering.
I suspect that the actual code speed will be decent; not what your going to get with well written C or even Objective C, but reasonably fast. All of that will be bottlenecked by the renderer and flash's various idiosyncrasies.
Posted 2 years ago # -
shadez:
It won't be as simple as recompiling; you'll still have to adapt the game to the platform (resolution, touches, etc) and the performance characteristics will likely require re-architecturing many things. Given the 200+ releases a day we're seeing now, I don't think it's going to make much of a difference.Posted 2 years ago # -
bradparks
MemberWell I just came across another interesting project today called "haxe" that's basically a programming language that focuses on building games... and it compiles to native code for iPhone, Flash and I believe native binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux too!
http://gamehaxe.com/2009/07/28/haxe-iphone-cpp-at-last/
The above post talks as if it renders using software, but I know for sure that the Flash side of it (neash) at least has been ported to use OpenGL...
Has anyone else tried it out? As I said, I just found out about it today and the simple examples I built and put on my iTouch got in the 48-60 fps rate....
Posted 2 years ago # -
I've built Flash apps in the past for Windows Mobile. Basically I had a C++ wrapper around an HTML object that hosted the .swf file and played it full screen. It ran pretty fast on a crappy 200 MHz PDA. HUGE HUGE HUGE memory leaks though. It would crash the device after some time. You could simply never get rid of the memory leaks. I know this isn't the case for the desktop, but on the WM PDA you had to do manual memory management IN FLASH just like we do in Obj-C. If anything, we will see a lot of Blackjack games and a lot of Sudoku variants. And a lot of leaked memory from devs who don't know better. Leaky apps won't get approved, at least I hope Apple actually tests them for leaks like they say they do. I can't see this being a real threat to the kinds of games possible with cocos2d and OpenGL.
Posted 2 years ago # -
by accident I bought another of the apps shown on the flash site (accident - thought it will be free and instantly clicked the buy button ;) )
It's the ChromeCircuit and wow... it's laggy as hell. it's just 2D tiny game (you can see it on the video they provide) but boy... it's laggy to the point it's difficult to play it !
Posted 2 years ago # -
Codemattic
ModeratorSo, at least at first, Flash to iPhone app will be good for puzzle type games - turn-based especially, and not for action type games. Canabalt is a great Flash game, I doubt the iPhone version could of been done in Flash. But the iPhone processors will get faster, and the Flash compiler will improve, so its coming.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Hi all,
I think this is something Apple will have to address in the near future, I wouldn't be surprised if they put these Flash games in a separate category on the app store, something like 'Flash Apps'.
I also hope that Apple insist that Flash iPhone game developers state in their game description 'Made with Flash' so that game buyers can filter out the rubbish!
Posted 2 years ago # -
This is really a big annoucement.
There will be so much more submissions than 200 a day, the app store and Apple guys will be flooded. Don't know how they will cope with this.As far as I'm concerned, I will keep using cocos2D, because as it was said before Flash will not allow to tweak the little deatils that makes the difference in a game.
But for a level editor for example I would love to be able to convert a Flas editor into an iPhone editor.
About the fps, I think that if you programm your Flash game with bitmaps, there is no reason Adobe can't manage to achieve good fps. Also if you use vectors with the cacheAsBitmap activated, there is not reason they can't achieve a good fps. Those demo games are early and I'm prety sure Adobe will improve things.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Codemattic
Moderator@jptsetung
"There will be so much more submissions than 200 a day, the app store and Apple guys will be flooded. Don't know how they will cope with this."agreed. Après Flash, le déluge!
But good for BonusLevel.org which does some very impressive flash dev.
"But for a level editor for example I would love to be able to convert a Flas editor into an iPhone editor."
Why not Cocoa + cocos? Just bc you are more familiar with flash/actionscript? Or are there advantages of Flash that Cocoa cant do?
Posted 2 years ago # -
Codemattic
Moderator"I wouldn't be surprised if they put these Flash games in a separate category on the app store, something like 'Flash Apps'."
unlikely.
"I also hope that Apple insist that Flash iPhone game developers state in their game description 'Made with Flash' so that game buyers can filter out the rubbish!"
There are plenty of terrific Flash games along with all the rubbish - pretty much like the app store is right now - tons of release, mostly rubbish, a couple of gems.
Posted 2 years ago # -
bradparks
MemberI think that there'll be exactly the same type of output from Flash developers as there are from Objective C developers - Varying quality.
But the one big benefit the Flash developers will have is that their apps will be cross platform, and can work in a browser too... Which of course *is* a big thing if your app doesn't get action in the appstore, at least it'd still be marketable as a web based product or on other platforms natively.
Posted 2 years ago # -
http://ragona.com/blog/flash-iphone-real-story/
Great information.
Posted 2 years ago # -
@Codemattic, about the level editor, the one I've made for BL took a LOT of time. That would be 3 months of work to develop the same thing in cocoa/cocos2D.
I would do this only for a game that really runs very well in the app store.
As an example, in an article on toucharcade about Power Pill ( http://toucharcade.com/2009/10/05/polytron-details-upcoming-iphone-game-power-pill/ ), the developer says they spent so much time on the level editor that they forgot to progress on the game engine!Posted 2 years ago # -
The current flash player doesn't even collapse literals, a = 5 + 5 remains as an addition in the bytecode. I don't think in the short term the flash publishing option is going to be particularly effective for anything other than turn based state games (famous last words).
I can only see this as a good thing in one respect, apple makes a lot of money from the app store, if it wants to continue to do so and have games companies continue to port their creations to the iPhone it will need to rethink the current "throw it all in a big bucket strategy" (<- my 2 cents)Posted 2 years ago # -
@abitofcode "throw it all in a big bucket strategy" let me add something:
"Throw it all in a big bucket and take a shit whilest sitting on it!"
- That's how I feel...~ Natanavra.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I'd like to see the Flash CS5 version of canabalt (http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/) against the version that's recently been ported, assuming this isn't already a CS5 port :s
Posted 2 years ago #
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