Hi all
Ive just started messing around with flash cs5 and trying to make a simple app for the ipad and have it eventually on the app store. The thing that has me concerned is that the animations seem to be struggling on the ipad.
im running it at 24 fps and there is zero physics and very simple AS3 for touch to stop animations. But the animations are running so slowly and the sound layer is no longer in sync with the animation.
Does anyone have any experience with this that can advise me on what the issue may be? why would a simple flash cs5 animation struggle as an ipad app? would the file type of the sound files be an issue?
any advise would be appreciated
We have updates on flash now.
Flash Professional 5.5 and adobe AIR 2.7.
You can see Adobe video demonstration the very same problem.Our team also faced same sort of performance problems here
The problem is Flash. Period. (It's actually the interpreter but that's besides the point...)
For best results, you need to code using the native SDK in objective-C.
You can use Adobe's porting tools but it's not going to work right because you're not using the tools designed for the platform.
In my opinion, Flash porting (if that IS what you're referring to) is for lazy developers who can't be bothering making a native app. They use this mostly for converting a Flash app to work on iOS.
Related
We are developing a web game that uses WebGL for the two biggest parts of it. Working with HTML / CSS was too slow and too limited, so it's off the table.
Thing is, iOS does not support WebGL publicly just yet, only on iAd. It is my guess Apple will eventually support it once the security issues they and Microsoft claim it has are fixed, and looks stable enough.
Problem is, if Apple does not do this by the release of the next mayor iOS version, then we will have in our hands a mobile WebGL game that does not run. 6 months of development and testing to waste.
So, questions:
If that was the case, how viable (regarding amount of time) is it porting the WebGL part of the game to native iPhone OpenGL? I'm afraid that porting will take longer than the development of the game itself.
I saw posts on Stack Overflow (like this) that suggested, on Android, adding the OpenGL interface manually to a WebKit element. It'd be slower than native. But either way... Is this something that could be accepted in the AppStore? Apple is very restrictive with these kind of stuff...
Thank you all for your time!
I'd say it takes 2-3 months to port, with the lack of input data in the question. Of course if this means learning Obj-C simultaneously it will be some uphill battle.
OpenGL is all the same in every run-time, so porting should be straightforward, or even running JS in the context of a native app.
Apple doesnt care what you submit to App Store as long as it works.
Anyone know of any flash equivalent software for the iPhone. Need to do some simple masking, animation...
As others have said, you can use AIR, but I'm guessing you want this to run in the browser, not as some native app. That is, you want something you can put on a web page, not distribute as an application through the App Store.
If that is the case, try Wallaby: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/
Wallaby can export certain Flash features to HTML5, which can be rendered in mobile Safari.
Hope that helps.
Depending on your exact needs (eg. if you want to work with timeline animations) then using the iOS packager part of AIR is a good option. For most uses however I would consider the performance of Flash iOS apps to be sub-par.
A development tool that is fairly similar to Flash programming-wise is Corona SDK:
http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/
Checkout Adobe's AIR. Its a run time that runs on the iPhone. You write in their flash language and then same code can run on iOS and Android.
Does anybody have any experience developing with all of these for the iPhone, in particular with regards to the performance of sequential view/image rendering?
For example say a flipbook style app containing 100 slides containing images/videos/text and then quickly swiping through them, with smooth easing transitions between them.
Which technology would be best suited for this?
I have started to play with Titanium and so far it looks very promising, I would very much like to find some more resources about AIR on the iPhone but they seem (for me) to be quite scarce, any ideas?
I have used Phonegap and Titanium for iPhone development.
Titanium is a much better choice for your purpose as it runs the UI as native code.
Phonegap will only render your app in webkit, so performance is never going to be optimal.
Another framework you should consider is Corona - which has more in common with Flash than either phonegap or titanium.
I have created an app using Titanium, and while it worked pretty good on the iPhone, performance on Android was horrible. I know you asked about iPhone performance, but I guess it's nice to know eh :)
Anyway, Titanium performance will never be equal to true native performance. but very usable.
I don't have experience with sequential view/image rendering, but I've been involved in the development of a couple of Phonegap, AIR and Titanium projects, and the winner for me is Titanium.
Phonegap is good, but tends to go sluggish once you start working with a lot of data.
Titanium has been indistinguishable, performance-wise, from a native application for the most part (and easier too!)
I haven't done too much with AIR, but it's reputedly not so good, although the next version of the packager is supposed to be much better.
i have used PhoneGap and Titanium, in the end I choose Titanium I did write an application requiring a photogallery type od swiping though pages and it works wonderfully.
This is a link to the final application in the app store
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kodak-gallery-quickie/id413197524?mt=8
I have an iPhone and am getting the Droid and was wondering if blender games can run on either of them. I have already made a game and want to be able to use it on my phone.
****UPDATE****
I was wrong, just recently android support has been added but it's brand spanking new so just know that android support would be considered beta quality if that, perhaps even alpha.
I can't believe no one has given this answer:
http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/
Supports the logic bricks/python scripts etc so basically you can just load up your packaged blend file and you're good to go.
there is actually a book on how to integrate blender into a iphone game development workflow. it uses sio2 for the game engine on the iphone. it might be worth to give it a shot.
I am interested in writing games for the iPhone and the Web. Ideally, there would be one language that I could write my games in and it would work on both platforms. I know this is not the case, so what is the best way to leverage code between iPhone apps (Objective-C/C++) and Flash SWFs (ActionScript)?
This maybe of some help
It uses the NME library which will allows code to mostly be written to the Flash 9 API and create the C++ for XCode to compile and run on the iPhone and Touch. This creates a path to port Flash games to iPhone/Touch.
Unfortunately, Flash and Objective-C are very, very different - and it's unlikely that a Flash player will be available for the iPhone in the near future. The native input methods used in Flash games - the keyboard and mouse - don't lend themselves well to the iPhone. While Apple could make Flash run on the iPhone, most Flash games would be totally unplayable (or feel very unnatural. They'd have to overlay a keyboard probably?). With the success of the App Store and native iPhone games, I think it's very unlikely you'll see Flash support anytime soon.
You might want to consider using a game development tool like Unity instead of Flash in the future. Unity allows you to create both 2D and 3D games, and you can program them in various .NET scripting languages. Once you've created the game, you can cross-compile it for web (their own plugin, not Flash), iPhone, or the desktop.
I know that doesn't help much since you have an existing codebase, but it might be something to consider for the future!
My company is developing a toolchain that allows compiling ActionScript3 to native code for mobile devices.
It now supports Windows Mobile and Symbian, and iPhone supported will be released in a couple of weeks.
Check it out at: http://developer.openplug.com/
BR
Guilhem
Adobe Alchemy looks promising. It is not released yet, but from their website:
Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).
This would allow iPhone apps and Web apps to share non OS-dependent C/C++ code, which is a very exciting prospect.
One option would be building everything in unity. The engine facilitates building the same game project to any of the following platforms:
Webplayer
OS X
Windows
iPhone
Wii
Actually, the iPhone supports Flash technically (see Developer creates Flash for iPhone and Flash Installer Update #2). It is just Apple's crippleware restrictions that prevent installation.
Other than that, there's really not much you can do. Flash/ActionScript and Objective-C are radically different. You can have a central server store data, but that doesn't solve the duplicated logic.
If you're already willing to use ActionScript you could go all the way over to the dark side and switch to Javascript. That's the only common language supported by your clients (web and iPhone).
How comfortable you are with either development environment certainly plays a role here. If you are a die-hard Objective C and a super star Actionscript programmer then doing both shouldn't be much of a problem. It will be lots of work of course, but not a problem.
However, if you are neither or only skilled at Actionscript then I suggest you focus on Flash/Actionscript for the time being. Eventually Flash will be available on the iPhone anyway. When that happens you can already have a number of apps ready to be quickly ported to iPhone. Also keep in mind. There are more portable devices out there than just iPhone. Getting your apps running on other devices might be worth it in the mean time.
Just keep in mind when you're developing your apps now that at one point you also want to run these apps on the iPhone. So make 'm in such a way that they can be controlled with an iPhone as well.
Updating this old QA with new information. The recently released monkey development framework deploys to both iOS and Flash: http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/
It's so new that I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it has a great pedigree: the creator made Blitz3D and BlitzMax before, and those were great game development tools.
That said, I would strongly recommend a combo like Corona for iOS and Flash for web, so that you're using optimal tools for each platform.