Flash Evangelist is In!

[Bryan]

 

Well, `evangelist` may be a little strong.  But I am going to go out on a limb and up on a soapbox and state:

Flash has come a long way, baby! It's an excellent platform for bb-games now.

I love having a persistent client side that can be manipulated at whim.  
I love being able to do most of the processing on the client side (Maps, anyone?)
I love the 90%+ saturation of the flash player on internet connected computers Read about it.  
I love that I can encode my swf's with various tools and add just-that-little-bit more security.
Still surprised (and loving the fact) that flash cookies aren't discovered as easily as other cookies.. lol
I really, really love being able to send minimal data from my php scripts and never have to render a template into HTML/CSS.. weee.. (best part, imho).
Do I care that flash isn't easily searchable by bots (well, Google can now)? Nope, certainly not as much as I enjoy having a login that can't be read by them.  And when (yup, definitely when) spam bots get more sophisticated, well, cross that bridge when we get there.  However, I have yet to meet a bot that can deal with flash.  Bye, bye ugly Captcha I can never read anyhow! (and it isn't as safe as commonly thought)

Over the past year or so I have been spending a lot of time developing in flash, and while it was painful to make the transition over to AS3 from AS2, I found several collateral benefits that I hadn't expected:
1) I can understand and even write Javascript now.  Not that I do much, but the two languages are very very similar.
2) I can understand, appreciate, and code in OO much much better now.  Actionscript required it, and now I like OOP much better. (this has nothing to do with my recent change of stance on OO for php)

That's why for the Official game challenge I decided to write a multiplayer (perhaps even massive multiplayer one day...) game that utilizes flash as the client side.

And after setting a bunch of stuff up and watching how the client to server action was performing, it dawned on me that flash really has a huge potential for what I want to do.

So, from now on you can refer to me as your local Flash evangelist, and while I may not be a Lee Brimelow, I am swiftly becoming fluent in all the little flash/as3 weirdness and stand ready to assist any of you who dare take the plunge into flash development.

 edit - added more things I love...

[dbest]

I dabbled in AS3 for a while using Flash Develop. Found it nice, but didn't work a lot with it.

[shoespeak]

Flash is really cool. This previous summer I tried to learn flash to make a basic top-down RPG (akin to the old zelda games.) One problem I had was finding tutorials/topics about large scale design...most of the material I was using were tutorials written for a specific purpose...these are great to learn special skills or making specific games. What I was really looking for though was an article with a larger scope in mind (like large game+community).

Maybe I'll try to how to use it again. Do you know of any good tutorials about connecting/using a database? This was one of the biggest things I was having trouble understanding (the other was having multiple users online; massive multiplayer). Your post really makes it seem like Flash has a lot to offer....plus there are only a few things I don't like about flash games: 1)lag (especially/mostly mmo) 2)usually no community

[Bryan]

1)lag (especially/mostly mmo)

What kind of lag are you talking about?  Lag from loading, or lag from trying to have a persistent server connection?

I think that one of the problems that arises when people start to think about using flash is the expectations factor.  It seems that people expect flash to do magic on the server side that it isn't actually able to do.  Flash is a client side application that uses a language very similar to Javascript in a FlashPlayer which runs in the Browser.  This sets the rules for what can and cannot be done.  For instance - flash can handle streaming, and even persistent connections - but only to a server also able to handle the same thing.  If you treat your application like a typical browser game, flash will add to the result.  If you try to get flash to do something that a custom server network and user client written in C++ does, you will be disappointed.  Flash is a suitable wrapper for browser games that can add some handy elements to the client, but it isn't the best approach to a streamed 3d real-time game experience.

Lag in loading can be solved easily.  First thing to do - keep the architecture of the internet in mind.  Don't put gigantic amounts of content in your flash files and expect it not to act like a gigantic amount of content when loading.  Utilize the tricks of the trade - flash can background load things you need next and appear not to have much wait time in the client side experience.  Flash can significantly decrease and compress vector graphics, bitmaps and other media as well, it can draw things on demand, and a bunch of other great stuff - but you are still working in the browser, on the standard HTTP-protocol channels, and need to keep that in mind.

2)usually no community

This has been the case because of database connection or connection to applications on the server which have been a weak point in older versions of flash and which the flash community of developers has never seemed too interested in.  I will write you a tutorial, as it's been a special project of mine for the past few years to find ways to connect flash to servers as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

There are a variety of routes to go, but I will give you a quick example from how I am doing it right now:
Flash has a class called URLVariables.
URLVariables has a method called POST.
Flash can POST to a php script and get a response back in URL-encoded format.
That simple.
It take about 2 minutes to set up and you can send data back and forth from a flash client to a php server application that does anything a regular form can do in an html page - except, you can essentially treat the server response as a POST back to flash - you just pass in your key=value pairs and flash decodes it into an object that you can them access like output.username = {{some name}}.

Another way to connect flash to a server that is a little more expensive on the processing for the server is to use the AMFPHP or ZendAMF (recently supported by Adobe, so it has a lot in store for it).  ZendAMF allows you to pass Data Value Object, do Class Binding, pass Arrays, stream files, and a load of other handy stuff if you need the powerful side of the data trasnfer. AMF3 is an compact format for data that Wade Arnold has written the PHP wrappers for - first in AMFPHP on his own, and now it's packed in ZendAMF.  What a great guy!  Zend_AMF has a standalone version that you can install w/o all the other parts of the ZF and it also can send MySQL result sets (in array form) directly back to flash so you can do all your data-parsing in the client and cut down server processing a little.  Not very many people have discovered AMF3 for flash yet, it's a wide open undiscovered country in what it could for bb games.

I will prepare a little tutorial on various aspects of connecting flash to a php-based game script on a regular apache server in a few formats after the 2010 pbbg game competition (or if I get ahead of schedule and have some extra time) and post it up in the forums here so you can get a few concrete examples to play with.

[133794m3r]

i have completely uninstalled flash from my machine and no longer use it what so ever. I saw it as just bloatware in my computer. I almost never play "flash games", youtube is very rarely's being seen and it's moving towards hmtl5's video capabilities. And also i'm glad you like flash. I'm just not a fan of using proprietary programs that are extremely overpriced to make anything. Flash is losing some of it's ground with html5, hopefully by the time it arrives, no one will use flash or require you to have a jre installed on your machine.

[Bryan]

Well, I'll probably miss seeing you play on my up and coming PBBG.  Could you post me some links regarding where flash is losing ground to HTML5, because I read dozens of web-design and technologies blogs every week and haven't seen anyone claiming that HTML5 is even in the running yet.

Addit - in fact, I recall recently reading that Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, and even Google hadn't been able to compromise on audio and video codecs to use, and decided to all go with their proprietary older versions which demonstrates to me that -once again- browser compatibility is going to be a huge pain in the average developers workload and probably lead people like me to turn back to reasonably dependable applications like flash that don't require you to deal with IE and others complete disregard for standards compliance.

This guy makes some good points: http://nwebb.co.uk/blog/?p=399

[133794m3r]

Well, I'll probably miss seeing you play on my up and coming PBBG.  Could you post me some links regarding where flash is losing ground to HTML5, because I read dozens of web-design and technologies blogs every week and haven't seen anyone claiming that HTML5 is even in the running yet.

i said it WILL BE and that i HOPE it will truly lose some. www.youtube.com/hmtl5 youtube serves billions of people each day. As the biggest video site in the net, it's a big hit on adobe's prowess. It surely won't die. And Yes flash is amazing i won't try to deny that. Without it sites such as youtube would've never taken off, and we'd never have the svg format. And HTML5 isn't even complete yet either it's just being worked on and is slated for a release a good long while from now. Flashs' main selling point is video streaming. Look at how many sites use it, and also w/o flash the porn industry wouldn't be able to be where it's at today. (adobe linked to "bangbros" when complaining about why the iPad doesn't have flash/what it'll miss out on so i'd say it's definately a major partner in their wallet) And video embedding becoming standard with html5 and google's embracing it is a nice step forward. It'll be awhile, but i can't wait till just having a web browser is all that's needed to experience the full web.

I do wish you the best of luck with flash, and i can say it's an amazing platform to work on. I did a small 4 level game using it during my game design 200 class. The teacher thought flash was better to use to show our design capabilities than doing some mod and i agree with him. For simple demoing, flash is pretty nice for getting your idea out there. And the scripting language is wildly powerful, once your game is out there and going i hope it does really well. It'll prove that a flash based mmo can be really successful and commercially viable well a real one perse. A few big companies out there are waving around their flash sites and saying that all you need is a browser(assuming you have flash there), but it's nothing more than a simple thing like Evony.

[Bryan]

I have a bunch of websites I do work on, and get some very extensive reporting on traffic from them.  There some sites that are still seeing over 70% IE6 users.  We have to make a downgraded CSS file just because of this one little problem- some people never seem to upgrade their browsers.  But they all have, oddly enough, the most recent version of the flash player installed.  Go figure.

[Bryan]

This just reminded me of something! Open Source Flash! osflash.org

http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

[133794m3r]

the post that seems to not have been shown for some odd reason... is that google is starting to kill ie6 support. Once ie6 is out of the door, it'll be alot simpler. Also it's simply b/c sites say "either go get flash latest or don't come here" but most sites will actually allow you to still come there with an old browser.  With more and more platforms not supporting flash, flash is slowly going out of the way.  Also open source flash is still flash so to speak. I prefer to adhere to open standards.

edit:Also look at the current most popular OS windows xp and if my memory serves right, it has ie6 on it. Most people just use their web browser, and so long as everyone's not going to force people to update their browsers they never will. The only people who have any remote right to have an extremely outdated browser are big companies and that's b/c they all refuse to update anything. With xp starting to get stale those same people will be moving to Windows 7 soon which'll make it so that they now have ie8 installed.

If microsoft, forced you to update ie when a new version was out, then we'd have no worries about anything. And it'd be amazingly simple thing for us.

[dsheroh]

This just reminded me of something! Open Source Flash! osflash.org

http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

Thanks for the link!  I've toyed with the idea of trying out Flash on and off for quite a while, but was always put off by how deeply it seemed to be tied to proprietary Adobe dev tools.  I'll have to take a look over that page and see what I can find for ways to work with it in *nix environments.

[Harkins]

Well, I'll probably miss seeing you play on my up and coming PBBG.  Could you post me some links regarding where flash is losing ground to HTML5, because I read dozens of web-design and technologies blogs every week and haven't seen anyone claiming that HTML5 is even in the running yet.

I've seen a few anecdotal things lately, but no big studies. Here's Lifehacker with a graph showing the rising percentage of their non-mobile visitors who don't have Flash, as well as notes from other sites that have noticed the trend. I wouldn't think much of the (mostly) small changes in numbers, but these are all alpha-geek watering holes and so could portend much larger mainstream changes.

And as long as we're talking Flash, here's a nice response to Adobe's blog whining about the iPad non-support at kung fu grippe. Funny to watch two control-freak companies butt heads.

[Bryan]

So, nothing there about HTML5, Harkins.  And the kung fu link was a waste of time.

Actually, as you may discern from the title and opening post content - this discussion thread was intended to be about the good things in flash not a local flash-hater group.  Perhaps we could get on topic, or I suppose if the only thing it attracts is negativity from this community I'll stop offering tips and tricks from my seven years of flash development, and let you all go to it.

[Harkins]

You asked for it, I linked it. I don't know why you think that means the community wants to drive you away; I'm happy to have someone with different experiences and perspectives contributing to the forums.

[Bryan]

I asked for a link to something that showed where HTML5 was gaining ground over Flash, and you didn't link that - the only reference in that Lifehacker article to HTML5 is the Authors opinion on it.  It does show some numbers for decline of enabled flash player in general, but nothing in relation to HTML5. (And the comments were a fun read... )

It's no surprise to me that the Mac oriented websites are chiming in there, either - seeing as Apple invented the Canvas element and don't install flash on their devices because they don't like the competition.

I did not say I thought that anyone was trying to drive me away, I said if this thread spirals down into mere flash bashing for no good reason, I'd leave you to it rather than wasting time posting about why I like flash.

In the Lifehacker article there was a great link to a blog article by John Nack who had this to say:

In the last couple of years, it has become trendy to bash the Adobe Flash Player. I need to say a few things on that subject.

{{snip}}

    * Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.

    * Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.

    * Talk of "what's good for standards is bad for Adobe" is misinformed nonsense.
    
    * Flash will innovate or die. I'm betting on innovation.

{{snip}}

Adobe spends millions of dollars a year building & giving away software--for which content viewers & even content creators don't have to pay a dime--to compensate for the rest of the world's failure to get the job done.

Maybe that sounds harsh, but I find the Flash-bashing tedious and hollow. Flash has all kinds of shortcomings; helping address them is why I joined Adobe, for God's sake! But Flash, as Winston Churchill might say, is "the worst except for all the others ever tried."

There are a lot of other very good points in that blog post.  

[codestryke]

Bryan I know you wanted to stay on topic about Flash but since you are the current evangelist I was wondering if you tried Silverlight at all? Personally I haven't and I haven't touched Flash in over two years so, from a Flash developer's standpoint, I'm interested in your views on the subject (if you have any).

I'm not wanting a holy war or anything of that nature. I tried to code stuff in Flash long and I had some real difficulty because I didn't speak the language of Flash. Kind of a kin to opening Photoshop for the first time LOL just so many new ideas and concepts to learn even before doing your first action. Not having played with Silverlight but have worked for and consulted for MS I know how much time they put into development tools and trying to please developers. I've heard that ActionScript has gotten a lot better since the last time I touched it but I haven't had a need since so I really haven't bothered.

Anyhow enough rambling on my end... It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on Silverlight (if you tried it that is)

[Bryan]

I installed the plug in for my browsers, and looked into the dev tools briefly but seeing as .NET framework has never installed and updated correctly on my Vista (go figure) I didn't bother to go very much further with it.  I figured if I couldn't get the thing working `out of the box`, it wasn't going to help my business move forward much.

I guess my first impression was that it was a lot more technical than flash - it seems to be a little more like real application programming - requiring .NET, Visual Studio (C++ or Visual Basic) and whatever else I downloaded - which didn't work correctly so I gave it up after a few days tinkering.

addit -

Just reading up on it a bit again, Silverlight 3 is out and seems to have moved towards more helpful (read: easy, simple gui) interface for designers.  I guess it's time to take a look at Silverlight again.  Although, I haven't seen much interest in what it can from my customers, they barely get past the simplest stuff into "Can we have a video of our product on our hompage?" and generally stop right there.  So, not much call for a new learning session for a rich media technology.  It seems like it's a little more geared towards programmers who would like to just use their existing C or VB skillset to do cool RIA sites.  So, my long struggle to learn actionscript wouldn't port over very well, although I have been told that I should get off my lazy streak and go learn VB at least if want to ever get anywhere making games.  meh.

[133794m3r]

HTM5 as i said was getting very littel ground but isn't doing much. It's making very slow headway. And also since silverlight's in here also. I did toy around with it a tad bit, and that was simply b/c my school, of course, had the MSDNAA thing so i could get full versions of visual studio and all of their other products to mess around in.

I personally don't see silverlight hitting it off for anything more than niche sites though due to the fact that the plugin requires .net framework and it is only native to windows. Yes they have a mac version official i guess, but the linux one'll always be behind the rest. And since most companies are interested in selling their product to everyone instead of just a few people, it'll never kick off and will remain as their other technologies have those being XNA, C#, VB.net and such other things. More of a niche item and nothing more. My main reason for even trying silverlight was because i could try it for free and well actually use it to do things w/o any worry about licensing fees. It was kinda neat being able to make a literal client that people could download and then also have it auto-update when need be. But i scraped it since, the linux version of it was always going to be atleast one version set of features behind the current one.

With more and more people going mobile, and as coder said, the amount of flash that's being seen is going down. It used to be that everyone just had a computer and had thta's what they used to get online. Now smartphones are getting used more and more and more and more they're no longer including flash either because of the technical constraints of the device or simply because they don't want to fool with the licensing fee.

If this current trend of ALMOST ANYONE can have a phone that can surf the web faster tahn what i was able to do when i was a kid keeps up. I doubt flash'll be completely viable for everyone simply because you want to be able to keep your site open to all.  And yes i agree that flash has helped us overall to help people adopt the internet. I know tons of people who only come online to go watch videos on youtube or chat in some im program. Without flash, the internet adoption rate would've been extremely lower. It has done a great job, i'm just about not limiting anyone from the potential pool of users since as soon as you say "all you need is a web browser" and then tack on having to download this you're killing off some of your potential pool. If you do do a great flash game amazing job for you. Flash has that potential to make extremely powerful games and it amazes me at the sheer power it has.

[jannesiera]

Some one just twittered this (regarding HTML5 canvas and CSS3 taking a bit of flash) http://anthonycalzadilla.com/css3-ATAT/index.html

[133794m3r]

Some one just twittered this (regarding HTML5 canvas and CSS3 taking a bit of flash) http://anthonycalzadilla.com/css3-ATAT/index.html

sadly.... it's only for webkit based browsers... i'm tempted to startup my old chrome install(got it back during beta) and see what that animation looks like.

[codestryke]

I just recently switched to Chrome as my main browser I loved Firefox but it's startup time was, for me, getting unbearable. Now that Chrome has extensions I almost have the same environment as I had in FF without the 7-13 second load time.

And the blazing fast JS engine is a sweet bonus

[133794m3r]

I just recently switched to Chrome as my main browser I loved Firefox but it's startup time was, for me, getting unbearable. Now that Chrome has extensions I almost have the same environment as I had in FF without the 7-13 second load time.

And the blazing fast JS engine is a sweet bonus

my main problem with chrome is how it looks+not having all of my addons. I literally cannot live w/o all of my glorious addons. And since the Adblockplus team has already started showing that the way that chrome does things it can't block things from loading. I can't live w/o my Tracking Server/Malware lists blocked from running. I also wonder how No Script'll work on there... and also stumble upon.... and i forgot ghosty.

[jannesiera]

HTML5 vs flash - http://remysharp.com/2010/02/08/html5-vs-flash/

Another tweet... Haven't took the time to read it yet, but thought it would be relevant.

[Bryan]

He makes a nice point - "I don't see this as an us and them, Open Web and Flash. I do see HTML5 plugging the areas that have been held up by Flash for the first decade of this century, and there are other areas that HTML5 supports that Flash doesn't - but Flash could even make use of, such as Offline Applications.

It's an exciting time on the web again where browsers are implementing features that make it an even more powerful platform to develop on. I for one, am keen as mustard to get building with the new shiny toys they're giving us. Equally, I'm certain Flash will continue to be used to build awesome [stuff] (and probably some not so awesome [stuff]) for a long time yet."

I replaced his term with a less likely to be filtered [stuff].

[codestryke]

I have a pretty firm grasp on what Flash can do, I really haven't played with HTML5's canvas yet. Personally I think it's going to boil down to which solution will protect the content the best. Doesn't matter which has the better features, which is faster, which one is GPL's etc etc the author wants to secure his/her content.

Maybe with making a game where you have to talk to the backend people will go with HTML5 because they won't be able to get the server code. However with movies they go with Flash because even though you can still dump a stream it's harder the right click save as