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Comment by JackdawX | Hacker News Reader

> And why bother? If you have the choice, why not go with HTML5 which already has some good and very fast free implementations available?

Well, I think this demo kind of proves why not: it doesn't work the same way on everyones browser. We've been talking for years now about html5 games obsoleting flash, but it doesn't seem to be coming together does it? My opinion on why not? We've got some serious problems with the spec and the people producing the spec. Even with the infinite resources of google, the chrome browser is not actually 100% compliant! Is that even fixable at this late stage of the game?

> Or as you're implementing your own environment anyway, go completely native?

That doesn't really help you distribute your games safely over the web to multiple people. Also, cross platform development is actually quite time consuming and hard, and the performance benefeits vs a VM are not really worth it for the average 2D flash-type game.

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> Well, I think this demo kind of proves why not: it doesn't work the same way on everyones browser.

Still, you are comparing this to flash, which has only one complete implementation at all which is only available on a subset of platforms and not open source. This number of platforms is decreasing, not increasing (ie, Android dropped).

> That doesn't really help you distribute your games safely over the web to multiple people.

Agreed, no one solved the problem of cross-platform application development (both desktop and mobile) yet. And flash doesn't succeed much, if any, better than HTML5 in this regard. But looking forward HTML5 looks more promising too me.

> Still, you are comparing this to flash, which has only one complete implementation at all which is only available on a subset of platforms

Huh?

A flash swf or flash compiled app is available on _all_ platforms. We aren't talking Flash on the iPhone, this is Flash _compiled_ to native for the iPhone.

Haxe NME and Unity3D are similar in that they let you write once and deploy to many. They also in fact let you "deploy to flash". They do this because if you know your audience, you know you need to still support IE8 and while you get IE8 you also get IE7/6. Believe it or not businesses are locked into these horrible browsers. Going 100% HTML5 is cool and trendy but why would you elect to cut off a subset of your users (who you are trying to make $ off of)

Haxe and Adobe (not sure about Unity) are also allowing you to export to HTML5. This would be interesting if they compared performance with that.

We are all looking forward to HTML5 taking over, but we are far from that place right now.

> Haxe NME and Unity3D are similar in that they let you write once and deploy to many. They also in fact let you "deploy to flash".

I think you're distorting my argument a bit -- I wouldn't invest in developing new flash app or game, but if you can get flash support for free through "compile to flash" I don't see any reason for not supporting it as extra option.

If Super Hexagon is a good example, Flash compiled to native iOS is quite sluggish.

edit: It uses Stage3D, so maybe not a great example.

> Still, you are comparing this to flash, which has only one complete implementation at all which is only available on a subset of platforms and not open source. This number of platforms is decreasing, not increasing (ie, Android dropped).

Indeed, there are problems with both implementations. I'm not saying that flash is the way forward at all, just that I'm starting to doubt that html5 technologies can actually achieve on a technical level what flash has acheived in a reasonable time frame.

Ignoring ideological issues for the moment (which are important too, but we could be here all day) the major benefeit of html5 right now is that your games can run well on gnu/linux machines, on which flash performs terribly. Techinically you can also target smartphones/tablets, but the performance here is really quite bad on almost all devices. So there is this promise of true cross platform coverage that isn't really being acheived. The major downside is this browser incompatibility stuff we've already discussed that is really hampering the platform, and the performance issues, which also varies wildly with browsers.

> Agreed, no one solved the problem of cross-platform application development (both desktop and mobile) yet. And flash doesn't succeed much, if any, better than HTML5 in this regard. But looking forward HTML5 looks more promising too me.

We're in agreement here, except for that last part. Will html5 (or 6 or 10) actually ever live up to what has been promised? Or should we be betting on a 3rd player at this point?

As someone who built and maintained a large-scale Flex app for 5 years, none of Flash's advantages are worth the countless unpredictable difficulties you WILL encounter. It's not a stable platform. Move on.

Maybe the story is entirely different for games, but I can't see how it could be that different.

> built and maintained a large-scale Flex app

I see your problem right there :)

Also, I am not aware of any stable platform for game development. Browsers and iOS have both changed a lot in the last 5 years as well.

Flash and Flex are EXTREMLY stable and easy to maintain for my projects. Maybe it is not Flash/Flexs Fault but yours ?

We were trying to build on a scale Flash just couldn't handle well, so in that sense, yes, we made a poor decision in going with the platform. But it looked good from the start, it was only after scaling that we ran into issues.

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