Flash and its Game Development Drawbacks

There was a time not long ago where I was super excited about the idea of really pushing Actionscript to its brink to deliver web-based games that rival the quality of older PC games (with better graphics). But alas! my dreams have been dashed! You see, Actionscript is an amazing medium; it can be used to make all kinds of applications, except applications that require any serious amount of processing.

To demonstrate my point I’ve created a wee demo. It’s a binary tree that uses recursion to draw itself. I’ve also added some code so that it can animate, but that’s more for fun rather than demonstration.

If you run the demonstration, you’ll find a very noticable delay when drawing more than 5 levels of recursion, or 126 branches. You’ll also notice that rendering takes an exponential amount of time longer compared to the next lowest number of recursions.

We aren’t splitting the atom here, we are merely drawing lines and my interpretation is that though Actionscript is great for more simple applications or a gui on a database, when it comes to serious processing power you are better off with different platforms.

For those who would argue that Actionscript is fine and I’m simply a crappy programmer (which I wouldn’t argue too much), you can optimize the code and prove me wrong here (CS4 fla here).

This is why my idea of an RTS in Flash is dead. Flash can’t handle it. Daphne is dead

BUT – Alchemy looks promising… speed of c/c++ in your browser, every browser, on every platform??? Fuck ya, that is an awesome idea (why every program for the OS then?)