I'm looking into developing a game using the flex SDK instead of flash. I'm kind of not sure how to start.
One question I have - does Flex have a timeline like Flash, with frames etc? Is there a main/root timeline?
From my experience with Flex it is event-based and does not use a timeline for development. That is not to say that you cannot implement timelines using state transitions. I'm not sure what the performance would be like compared to Flash.
Related
Before I spend a lot of time (I guess) reading up on SpeechSynthesisUtterance, is this the way to go to add voice recognition to my Dart+Polymer web app?
In fact, all I need is dictation (to fill in a text box). Nothing particularly clever (on my part at least!).
Or [polymer] "is there an element for that?" ;-)
cheers
Steve
If it works in JS you can make it work in Dart. No need of Polymer but it will work with Polymer.dart as well.
I have a successful kids educational maths game made in Adobe Flash ActionScript 1, its a fairly simple game but there is animations for example a plane crashing into our logo and breaking it apart.
Could I use HTML5 and tools such as PhoneGap and get it to work like it does now in an iPad App and get Apple to accept it on there App Store? I'm drawn towards HTML5 because its non-propriety and has a promising future but will it be able to replicate the game. I've noticed the featured games on the PhoneGap website aren't very interactive/game like compared to Adobe AIR app examples.
Thanks
You could definitely recreate the game in HTML5 and use PhoneGap to package it for iOS. As long as you follow the app store guidelines, there's no reason why the game wouldn't be accepted by Apple.
The game logic seems straightforward enough and should, therefore, be relatively easy to translate to JavaScript. However, I think there may be significant effort involved in reproducing the animations you have, to an acceptable level of performance, using standards-based web technologies.
There are a few avenues I can think of which it might be worth your while exploring:
Google's swiffy will convert SWF files to HTML5 so you can use them on devices which don't support Flash. I have used it successfully to convert a reasonably complex Flash animation, however the performance of the animation on the device, when it was packaged as a native app for iOS using PhoneGap, was significantly worse than the Flash version. I'm not sure whether the tool would be capable of converting the whole game (definitely not if it's pulling in dynamic data), but you could certainly use it to translate the individual animations of the game.
Adobe Edge is an animation tool similar to Flash for creating animations in HTML. I've not used it so I don't know whether it's any good. However, it is still a relatively new product and a quick search for character animations using Adobe Edge wasn't particularly encouraging.
The CreateJS toolkit for Flash Professional is a free extension which will convert Flash animations to JavaScript using the open source CreateJS framework (which looks superb and may be a good starting point for rebuilding the game should you decide to convert it).
Convert the game logic from ActionScript 1 to ActionScript 3.0, reuse all your existing animations as is, and package the game for iOS using the Adobe AIR packager. Inevitably the performance won't be comparable to native, but I think it should be acceptable for this type of game.
I think in your case I would probably go for option 4, primarily because you'll save yourself the effort of recreating / converting existing animations in another technology. I would definitely encourage you to embrace HTML5 and associated technologies but would suggest you use them on a new project which will allow you to plan around its particular strengths and weaknesses.
We are deciding to use Cordova/PhoneGap engine for iOS application development. We looked at some samples in PhoneGap app gallery. Their responsiveness in the meaning of touch reaction time is very bad in comparison to native apps.
We also found some articles on improving the responsiveness. For example, this one.
Now we want to see real world PhoneGap applications with the best possible UI responsiveness to be sure that it works. Do you know such applications?
Well if the developer is using click events then you are going to get the 300ms delay before the event is fired. Instead they should be using tap events as the article you discovered mentions. There is really no way for us to know if a developer is doing things "the right way" unless we look at their code.
You should check out the Wikipedia app which was built using PG for example. As an added bonus all the source is available at:
https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile
I'm looking to revamp our mobile site with something simple for phones below the ambiguous smart phone category and something a little more interesting for the phones above this category. I'm not interested in WAP/WML for this project. I'm building a ASP.Net 4 MCV 2 app and using MBDF
What I'd like to know is how best to define this differentiation when using MBDF? Screen size, Javascript, SpportsTouchScreen etc. are all in MBDF along with others but I'm not sure where to draw the line and where the data is most accurate for the broad number of devices.
What do those of you out there developing for this spread of hardware & software split on?
Thanks,
Denis
P.S. I've done my research on xHTML MP1.0 - 1.2 and the best practises for implementation to ensure broad coverage but I don't want to restrict the newer phones out there to what the base line can see.
I personally use simple mobile browser dedection script and limit max screen width to 240px. I also use simple AJAX and JavaScript calls too.
Above setup works fine for 90% of my visitors but my sites aren't business critical sites.
You can try http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ but .net api is not as good as PHP one
So after a bit of testing myself I think I'm going to stick with testing if they support JavaScript and Touch using the MBDF. This line in the sand isn't perfect but it seems like the best out there to me.
Here is a neat little tutorial on Browser Detection using JavaScript
Browser Detection
What resources (books or website/tutorials) are available, that cover game development using pure Actionscript 3 code? By pure, I mean not using Flash CS4 and its timeline, and not using Flex MXML components. Everything done using only Actionscript code.
In another question, I asked about using certain objects of the Flex SDK for simple games, and the consensus was that I shouldn't use it at all, but only Actionscript for a game. Sounds reasonable, but the books/website tutorials that I have found on the subject of games, all use AS3 in the context of Flash CS4. They assume your objects will be movieclips, with timelines, etc.
I realize that you can learn game programming from books in other languages, and/or ignore the Flash aspect of AS3 books. I guess what I'm looking for, is whatever information is specific to AS3, such as best practices for AS3-only games, how to make architectural/design decisions, etc. If it exists, anyway :)
You may want to take a look at Flixel.
What is flixel?
flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours.
Flixel is licensed under the MIT license and the site has quite a few tutorials to get you started.
Flash Adventure Game Tutorial
series shows you how to create a
Flash adventure game with Flex and
ActionScript.
FlexFighters
shows you how to make a shoot'em'up
with Flex and ActionScript.
This is a tutorial series that shows you how to make a 3D Flash game with Flex and Away3D
A site that is basically all about using just pure AS3 and that now has game tutorials centered around his pure AS3 game making library is www.actiontad.com.
Your games may be smaller using only AS3 and the SDK, but you loose the ability to animate with a timeline, animations made with the timeline in Flash will perform better, than say sticking a whole bunch of .pngs together, which is a technique actiontad uses, but that site is coming into it's own now with the library he recently released, if pure AS3 game making is your thing it's worth a look.
If you want to deploy your games on mobile (iOS/Android) you should take advantage of Starling (http://gamua.com/starling/), 2D rendering engine built on top of Stage3D, which gives you GPU raw power.