gameswf on the iPhone

[bliprob]

I was looking at the gameswf repo over the weekend and was surprised to see that there's a branch for the iPhone. I built the code and tested it with some SWFs I found (gameswf only supports AS2, so I had to do some digging, and found mostly crap). Here's some screenshots:




(I tried to make it work in portrait orientation -- no dice.)

The framerate was totally acceptable. Lossy-compressed bitmaps look really soft compared to the lossless bitmaps.

I spent an hour looking for a simple way to integrate this with Unity iPhone, but the code seems to makes some assumptions about being the only thing running, so it will take some work.

Edit: link: http://tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html

[Minevr]

You can always bring surprises~~

[Armagon]

Why, when CS 5 will bring iPhone publishing?

[dreamora]

$1300 for Flash CS5 Pro?

[n0mad]

Thumbs up

[bliprob]

Why, when CS 5 will bring iPhone publishing?

I dunno, just thought it was nifty. I guess:

a) It's available now,
b) the source is public domain, so you can improve/fix it as you see fit,
c) odds are CS5 won't integrate with Unity iPhone, but this likely will.

The whole point of gameswf was to make game menus in Flash. That's still a decent idea.

And if you're a flash guy and want to get your shovelware into the app store ahead of the crowd, well, here's your solution.

[ugur]

Yes, this is very interesting, as Stinkbot said its very unlikely the Adobe solution will be easily combinable if at all with anything else and the content made with it also can´t be extended easily with any functionality it doesn´t have by itself.

Next up that the gameswf solution supports AS2 content is a huge plus.
The Adobe solution only supports AS3 content and even with that all apps released so far run at lousy performance.
I find AS3 itself to be a buggy wannabe Java copy and also when using AS3 a different garbage collector is used which is a buggy piece of junk and in AS3 workflow one can reparent display objects but in return much of the movieclip playback and control side of previous flash versions is broken and therefore its much less useful for complex nested timeline animation, next to visual workflow in the ide; in general for non codeside 2d stuff; so the only thing flash has a real advantage in compared to many other technologies is way less usable with AS3 workflow.
There are reasons why many longtime flash users are switching to unity and other technologies, many feel like there´s too few progress and also buggy and ill conceived progress on Adobe side.

So yes, if this gameswf solution could be combined with unity stuff that´d be huge.

[wadoman]

$1300 for Flash CS5 Pro?

Actually it's $699.00 :wink:

[OXYGEN]

shovelware onto the appstore heavens forbid! flash developers are not that shallow... and to suggest they would sacrifice quality over content..thats a highly disingenuous comment to make stinkbot :wink:

[ugur]

After trying it for a while and chatting some with bliprob, i wrote a blog post on it here: http://www.potatocows.com/?p=71

[JTBentley]

And if you're a flash guy and want to get your shovelware into the app store ahead of the crowd, well, here's your solution.

I've got this idea, its totally mine... We steal all of Nintendo's best intellectual property, don't even ask permission.. Their sounds, they're graphics.. We pretend its ours, and sell it with a misleading name so people think its .. Mario!

Really though, its a poorly made sound board.

...... If someone gave me that as a pitch, I'd fire them. However, the person who went and did that now owns a fleet of Yauchts which he uses to put shade over his bugattis. Nintendo don't seem to mind for some reason.

[GhostDog]

I ported gameswf over to the iphone and after some performance tests I backed out. Here are some of my observations...YMMV

Unless you are willing to spend some serious time optimizing the tessellator, anything less than a 3g may have performance issues. One huge caveat: my swfs were mostly shape based. I mitigated some of the performance problems by changing shapes into textured quads. That seems to improve performance immensely. I was no longer vert bound.

The benefits of continuing down the road with gameswf would be because of the authoring tool.

Another issue I had was that gameswf was only AS 2.0 compliant at best (there were some 2.0 features that were missing). I'm not a flash expert but from what I understand, 3 and 4 have some pretty cool features that game artists/designers would like to use.

To do anything with cool with gameswf, my least technical people would have to write script (ex artists making cool GUIs). There is some work you can do to bust out functionality into a template library for artists to use, but it's just more work just to get the pipeline usable.

If you have more than 1 person working on the same GUI, for example, expect collisions to occur frequently in source control. A lot of times people to be blocked waiting to get latest on binary assets so they could check in changes. Maybe there is a better way to version flash assets...I don't know.

I came to the conclusion that I would almost rather spend my time making a tool inside of Unity than squeezing blood from the this open source project. I didn't see it as a huge win after my evaluation.

[bliprob]

I agree Ghostdog -- it's definitely not ready for prime time. But like a lot of open source projects, it can be useful for some things. My primary thought was to use this for my game's menus, because making the menus is sucking the life out of me. But I realized that making the menus AND making igameswf work for me would suck more.

Also, I agree on the AS2 stuff -- I tried some really simple games that didn't run. Maybe it's not running global code, stuff that's not in a function block or event handler? Haven't dug in yet to look. I thought its AS2 support was pretty amazingly complete, though, considering what a chore that would be.

If your dev team is heavy with AS3 devs, then just use Adobe's CS5.