Develop games with pure actionscript or adobe flash cs4 professional

Question

Hi,

I want to develop a simple race car game. A user will see his car from above and can use right and left arrow keys to navigate in the track and between other cars.

What is the correct way to develop a game? Do I use pure actionscript with FlashDevelop or the Eclipse plugin? Do I use Flex3? Is it better to use adobe Flash CS4 Professional?

The advanced version will also include 1-on-1 or multiplayer game. Do you recommend a separate XMPP server to send real time data between players or is there a flash server suitable for this?

A book about games in flash and links to tutorials will be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm only answering this for points. Dude, you have a lot of work to do if you are serious about this (which i doubt, since you don't even now how to use a search engine or wikipedia). Anyway, here you go...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

Answer 2

Man are you on the verge of a brave new world, ha.

Alright, so basically everything that you're mentioning is a viable option. A lot of it is going to come down to personal preference, honestly.

If you are a very visual person and it helps you to see things on the stage as you control them, go with Flash. It's not quite as powerful as Flex when it comes to dealing with data, but allowing you to link up your classes to sprites and movie clips in your library is huge and honestly underrated by a lot of "serious" developers.

If you're going for multiplayer, you might consider looking into Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Services. It's a hosted solution from Adobe that takes a lot of the work out of setting up a multiuser environment, though it's not free.

Finally, if you can wait a few months, Flash CS5 will allow much tighter integration between FlashBuilder (the upgrade to Flex Builder) and Flash. Basically you'll be able to use both together very easily.

If you want to get started learning this stuff, I strongly recommend Lee Brimelow's excellent site gotoandlearn. The first few on there are AS2 so feel free to skip them, but just watch all of his AS3 examples in order and when you're done you'll be a flash developer.

You can also check out the Adobe Flash/Flex Cookbooks to look up specific questions, or google "Flex in a Week" to learn flex.

Good luck!

Answer 3

first of all: there is no correct way to develop games ...

one advice I'd like to give you is: do not use CS4 for developement ... CS4 is a great tool to create graphics and animations, etc., but is terrible for programming ...

if you want to develop a proper game (or any sort of web app), that you don't want to scrap within months, you need to layout an extensible, flexible and robust architecture, which can only be done with rock solid code, and than plug in all you nice graphics and effects (which can be made in CS4 of course) ...

Flex is probably the fastest way to get UIs up and running ... if you are for example creating a strategy game, which requires a lot of forms and overviews etc., then you should use Flex for that, altough ASwing and other frameworks are reasonable alternatives ... I do not like Flex for a number of reasons, but I guess in the end they're all a matter of taste, so it is up to you to decide what you'll use to create all the standard UI your game will need to have ... the more UI to create, the more I'd advise you to use Flex ...

when it comes to servers, most people tend to use Red5 and SmartFox, which both perform quite well, yet in my opinion have quite a lot of unnecessary overhead and impose a lot on your networking engine ... still, you can start with them, and might find out they're just what you need ...

here comes my personal advice: use haXe ... it allows you to use one language for servers and clients ... also, it is a great language, once you get the hang of it ... I used AS2 and AS3 for a lot of time, but since I finally had the courage to switch to haXe, I don't want to go back ever again ... although the languages appear to be similar, they are not, so do not expect them to ... once you got your head around it, you'll understand what I mean ... check out ThreadRemotingServer for creating servers easily ... check out haxelib (more info here) to get some helpful stuff ... and don't be shy to post on the mailing list ... haXe has a great, friendly, helpful and enthusiastic community ... there's also a forum (which is not used so much) and an IRC channel to get support ...

hope this helps ... ;)

Answer 4

In the 'good' old times I used to make small Flash games in Flash IDE with AS2. That was really fast. (Though, code was quite ugly.) Since AS3 is available, I use Flex. If graphics matter, I use Flash IDE and Flex Builder parallel (Build/compile/draw in Flash, code in Flex Builder). Of course, it's not the best, but I just hate how Flash IDE handles code.

For the multiplayer mode, I suggest taking a look at this article: http://www.flashrealtime.com/basics-of-p2p-in-flash/ It uses Adobe's Stratus server to do P2P communication. It's quite easy to setup and use.

Books: http://flashgameu.com/ - basic level, but good for beginning And of course: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526948

My favorite tutorial site: http://active.tutsplus.com/