What is "flash"?

Racer1 · July 2009

In the twitter updates, they mentioned commander mode "flash" vs "lua". Is "flash" referring the Adobe product, or something else? If Adobe, what advantages does Flash have over just using the native game graphics engine?

Harimau · July 2009

there's already been discussion in the Official twitter thread about this. have a look.

Racer1 · July 2009

Ugh...I hate wading through long threads that have no specific topic. Thanks anyways.

Racer1 · July 2009

So, basically its all speculation right now....
NS2 <i>may</i> be using Adobe Flash.
NS2 <i>may</i> be only using the Flash hud files, but rendering them with the internal engine.
NS2 <i>may</i> be using some other technology completely, which has nothing to do with Adobe.

ljcrabs · July 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Ugh...I hate wading through long threads that have no specific topic. Thanks anyways.</div>
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?act=findpost&hl=&pid=1706530" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index....amp;pid=1706530</a>

Phlash · July 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (ljcrabs @ Jul 9 2009, 02:13 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1716561"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?act=findpost&hl=&pid=1706530" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index....amp;pid=1706530</a></div>
Thanks for clearing that up.

SjN · July 2009

NS engine was entirely coded in the older version of Flash... Macromedia Flash

FocusedWolf · July 2009

Wow flash is utter fail... everyone knows WPF is way cooler! especially for windows programs.

Perhaps the NS2 developers can implement a sort of WPF in NS2 for designing the interfaces... it wouldn't be that hard i imagine... just xml parser basically and support the commands with stuff in game. I bet it would be easy to mashup any interface in that way.

Alaska · July 2009

they trie to use as many platform-independent technologies as possible. WPF isn't an appropriate choice for that goal.

Phlash · July 2009

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Alaska @ Jul 10 2009, 03:37 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1716765"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>they trie to use as many platform-independent technologies as possible. WPF isn't an appropriate choice for that goal.</div>
Exactly. Not only that, but Flex is in many ways better than WPF. Certainly, WPF looks nice, but manipulating the location of objects has proven to be a pain with it. Flex and Actionscript are incredibly simple on that front, and are very robust at the same time. Flash is a good choice for the interface.

FocusedWolf · July 2009

do you people bother to read my entire post or did you just stop at "WPF"...

I said to create something SIMILAR to WPF, and i also said XML... are you going to tell me a textfile with XML isn't platform independent... that their are no opensource XML parser libraries available... that they can't roll their own XML parser???

I see nothing hard about allowing something like this to work: <a href="http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/lcars.xaml" target="_blank">http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/lcars.xaml</a>

Here's a preview image of it rendered: <a href="http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/lcarsScreenshot.jpg" target="_blank">http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/lcarsScreenshot.jpg</a>

Note:::: NO graphics... or TEXTURES of any kind are in use here... the interface is being created in realtime from the xaml markup.

EDIT: i did some work and finished the commander interface for NS2:
<a href="http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/commandersChair.png" target="_blank">http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/commandersChair.png</a>
<a href="http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/commandersChair.xaml" target="_blank">http://wolfsfiles.googlepages.com/commandersChair.xaml</a>

It's a LCARS interface i just whipped up with some microsoft expression-design tools (sorry it's like the first time i really used these tools so it's a little crude... xD)... ofcourse if NS2 uses flash... you'd need flash authoring tools to design them right... (ya if you don't see the interface you can install Kaxaml and just paste the contents of that file in as text and it'll render it... it's interactive.. well those are real textboxes that you can type in... lol

Anyways... theirs something about rendering flash --- in a game engine --- that doesn't seem cross platform to me.. i mean... i bet they just bought some embeddable dll code-product to get the job done... or else what.. they only support a subset of the flash capabilities ... that would be weird... maybe they do it like with the gameoverlay that steam does... by overlaying a webbrowser lol... ya you need 5 GB to run NS2 :P

Overall it seems like it would of been smarter to just provide a homebrew solution similiar to xaml's offerings... it would be lean and mean...just used for making skinned buttons and text areas and listboxes... but instead they are going to render flash as your interface??? something that sounds like it's gonna eat up alot of memory all on it's own.

Naturally it opens the door for ingame advertisements and weird flash based rule displays requiring you to register on some random forum just to play on the server... i wonder if it'll be like a security exploit that lets people hack your system with malicious flash.

<a href="http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001447.html" target="_blank">http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001447.html</a>

Nice!!! your flash interface can download trojans... yep full of fail right here.

What is "flash"?

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