Flash/silverlight and multiplayer games

Question

Hello,

I wonder if it is possible to build a game with flash/silverlight that has multiplayer (let's say 2 players) features with lots of realtime interactivity between players. Dofus (Ankhama Games) uses flash. In this interview, the developer says :

"Pourquoi Dofus est un jeu au tour par tour ? J'aimerais pouvoir dire que c'est uniquement dû à Final Fantasy Tactics, mais pour être tout à fait honnête, c'est aussi parce que Flash avait du mal à afficher trop d'animations en même temps."

In English : "Why Dofus is a turn based game? (...) to be honest, it is also because Flash couldn't display lots of animations at the same time".

It that true? To be clear, let's take an example everybody knows : is it possible to clone Warcraft 2 with Flash/Silverlight?

Thanks

Answer 1

A key thing you need for this is really fast communication between the client and the server -- UDP rather than TCP sockets. This will be supported in Silverlight 4, which is currently in open beta.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ncl/archive/2009/10/20/udp-multicast-in-silverlight-4.aspx

On the graphics side, the performance should easily be good enough for something like Warcraft.

It's not entirely clear to me whether Flash has proper UDP support: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/907041/is-it-possible-to-use-udp-in-flash-actionscript

Answer 2

The real reason that you can't make any kind of serious game using Flash is that it's distributed to the client in near cleartext. It's painfully simple to get almost all the code from a SWF file and hack even the most carefully constructed game server. Java isn't any better since any child can decompile a JAR file. Maybe try shockwave. It's got a DX9 3d engine and a killer physics engine now. AFAIK it's not able to be decompiled. You can also embed flash inside shockwave for your 2d interface.