Avoid future upgrade problems: Compile to Flash SWF format

ORBZ

Here is my idea for how GameSalad could avoid any future upgrade hiccups.

Just compile the game to Flash SWF format and do away with your web player all together.

It shouldn't be that hard if you are already outputing to ARM assembly and Mac OSX binaries, just output to Flash9 SWF AS3 format.

Then you get the added bonus of running on Mac or Windows and you don't have to convince people to download and install a plugin.

jkornoff

GS exporting to flash is my #1 wish. Games will work on all browsers and we could promote our games all over the web and have them playable anywhere. We are left to promote our games the best we can ourselves, and the best way to do that is via flash.

That's my $0.02. Thanks!

BeyondtheTech

No offense, but it almost sounds like trolling. I don't think Flash is the answer, considering that Apple has been taking a stance against Flash for a number of years now, and many savvy users are avoiding Flash on websites as it's a resource hog with security risks. GS has it's own proprietary engine that runs your game and code, and it has been proven to run well on a few platforms already, including the iPhone.

Give them time to sort out the issues and we will all be back up to speed very shortly.

JamesZeppelin

Yeah im with BTT on that.

Flash is a resource hog. thats the main reason its not on the iphone.

Besides i dont think its as simple as just say... converting your JPG to PNG

Its just not even the same thing.

You'd pretty much have to start from teh ground up and build a GS flash engine from scratch... then connecting the two would be a whole diff story in itself

ORBZ

Well, i'm not trolling because I don't even know how to use Flash. I'm just saying they are 92% market penetration and the only universal binary format that exists on the web and that's what I'm really saying. I could care less if it's actually Flash. Just SOME sort of binary format.

Basically if they are just exporting Lua to Cocoa then why not do Lua to AS3 ? Or how about SVG then if you don't like Flash?

They need to bundle the interpreter with the code that it executes. That prevents future upgrade problems.

I don't care if it's flash or not, just that it bundles the interpreter version with the code version.

So if you publish with version x and in the future version y comes out you don't have to constantly scramble to keep older versions up to date with the interpreter-of-the-month. Just bundle the interpreter (whatever version it may be) with the game logic.

As we can see the actual interpreter plug-in is really small. Why not just bond that directly to our code?

As a new version comes out all the old stuff will still work.

ORBZ

OK, how about Java then? Just output to Java byte code.

JamesZeppelin

I dont mind flash, Im just mean i don't think its that easy.

jkornoff

Flash is not on the iPhone because Apple doesn't want developers creating flash games/apps and having those bypass the app store by playing inside the browser. The 'resource hog' argument is a red herring, I believe. And for web distribution of interactive content, flash is king. I don't think any of our dual-core, quad-core, or 8-core machines even blink an eye at running any complexity of flash.

Porting GS over to flash may very well be a huge undertaking. I guessed GS was some sort of wrapper for a proprietary version of flash inside it's plug in. Apparently it's something else.

Great job with GS so far team! Really! I'm just making an observation. Thanks.

Vmlweb

It would be great if eventualy GS could export to

exe (windows)
app (iPhone)
app (mac)
swf (flash)
jar(java)

If it had all these it would trueley be the best game engin in the world.