Flash vs. HTML 5

[Pazil]

Try the Flash vs. Unity thread maybe? (siiiiggghhh...)

I find it interesting, I try to arrange an FK competition, people say there's not enough interest. Start a debate about Flash vs. Unity, and we have Sentinelese booking flights to the nearest internet cafe to get in on the action...
w/e...

[tomsamson]

Yeah, well, it is a great example for one of the main problems of this and any other such technology and deploy form specific forum:
It isn´t the landscape of 5-10 years ago anymore where there was basically director and flash and not much else noteworthy on the web plugin side and one either deployed as standalone app or for web and that was about it.
nowadays there are more and more languages, middleware and other technology solutions and deploy options popping up in more frequent intervals.
So yeah, that leads to a debate between people who would like to act as if there was never something else to talk about than flash web games and well, the other bunch who is also into trying and talking about other things.

With flash, well, it is very useful for many things, but to me it is so common by now what it can handle nicely and what not, may be more interesting again when it runs better on more of the mobile platforms and the molehill player and ide comes out, but yeah, until then, well, there´s more discussions about html5, unity etc than the usual everyday flash talk for many

I think a lot of people here still also talk about their flash stuff a lot, too, just usually on their company website, blog, twitter account or similar things.

[MikeMD]

Start a debate about Flash vs. Unity, and we have Sentinelese booking flights to the nearest internet cafe

Well I have been quiet for a long time, I rarely visit, but occasionally you just have to question WTF some people are smoking when they bring up Unity on this forum.
According to those people Unity should have replaced most of the games all over the web by now, when Kongregate announced support for it a year ago it was supposed to be another blow to flash and beginning of Unity takeover. I said it then and a year later you can see I was right ( count Unity games even on Kongregate ) and I repeat it now; It's not going to happen. When this contest is over, prizes handed out it will be all flash again and business as usual.

Unity is used for many things and it is making quite big leaps on most fronts, so why are you so stuck on insisting the opposite?

That's fine and I never disputed that, but I also say: " go to Unity site and discus it there as it is completely irrelevant on this forum". It's not my problem you have trouble paying attention and sticking to the relevant facts. I am talking and always have been talking about a specific market.

If you insist bringing it up here, then it has to be compared to flash and what flash really is and that is the absolute domination of the browser gaming market. Any idiot could make just as many crappy games in Unity even easier than in flash and it's even free ( flash costs money ). So why aren't they doing it? Simple, there is no need for it and you can't make money with Unity the way you can with flash ( in that particular market ).

All those other things you mention, whether true or not, do not matter here.

I may pick up Unity and make some 3D game with it, but you won't find me on this forum talking about it. What would be the point? What's that got to do with flash? Unity is not and will never be a replacement for flash and I've been telling you that for the past 3 years. Just man up and admit you were wrong and let it rest. According to you flash should have been dead and all portals running Unity only content by now.

Back on topic. Same $hit goes for HTML5. It's crap, all of the hype is financed by Apple and it's all lies; it will not replace flash, won't even be noticed for at least another 2-3 years ( game wise, sites are a different story ).

And before anybody replies, please check: we are in flash > games forum.

[tomsamson]

OMG! The wormhole is collapsing, quick, everyone back to their own parallel universe!

[webgeek]

Ha ha ha, I find this whole thread has taken a funny turn. All good conversations drift and the discussion, while departing from the original topic, has done just that. MikeMD - you are the one that made first mention of Unity in this thread. The rest of us responded to YOUR comment about Unity. It was this specifically from post #7:

Take it from somebody who told you 3 years ago that Unity will never amount to anything in the browser gaming arena and of course I was right.

My Unity post was basically stating that in my professional opinion Unity is starting to take off and be used for large-scale browser based games. I'm not at all saying it's going to displace Flash entirely or put all Flash devs out of work. I'm simply stating that there are already quite a few large-scale Unity browser games in development and the number is growing rapidly. I think this negates your "never amount to anything" comment.

As I also said, Unity isn't converting Flash devs, it's converting traditional game studios from the top down. Hell, Unity effectively put Gamebryo out of business and forced the Unreal Engine to dramatically change it's licensing model to even compete. The latest GDC survey showed that a huge majority of devs are planning on using or evaluating Unity for their next project vs. all the other game engines out there.

Electrotank's experience these last few years has been that we see a steadily increasing amount of Unity-only or Unity preferred projects as it relates to large scale virtual worlds and MMOGs. Almost all of these have been either entirely web-based or had a significant web component. Fusion Fall from Cartoon Network (the first Unity MMORPG) while a bit hit and miss proved that Unity web MMOs can be built and it opened the floodgates. Here are two heavy Unity studios that are both building browser-based games:

http://www.aquiris.com.br
http://www.bigpoint.com

Interesting to note that Aquiris in particular actually does a lot of browser advergames - the type of thing that is the bread and butter of many Flash developers - but they use Unity exclusively.

Electrotank is by anyones definition a Flash shop. Heck, Adobe is planning a write up on our slick use of Adobe AIR for our MMO tool suite and we were nominated for an award at the Adobe MAX conference this year for that same tool suite. You are more than welcome to ignore our experience but we have followed the shifting technology trends for quite a few years as that's how we stay competitive. The trend is currently quite clear - Unity is expanding into the high-end browser game market very aggressively and is going to start to be the platform of choice for the >200,000 dollar games - obviously depending on the format.

With all that said, I do agree quite strongly with this:

Worry about your next game design

Right now, we base the technology choice off of #1 client requirement, and #2 game design. If the client requires Unity, then it's Unity and that's that. But if the game doesn't need full 3d and the client doesn't insist on Unity then we will go Flash for sure. HTML 5 doesn't even enter our discussion as it's so incredibly limited.

-Mike

[tomsamson]

couldn´t agree more. My previous comment was just due to having enough of arguing the same points over and over

[MikeMD]

All good conversations drift and the discussion, while departing from the original topic, has done just that. MikeMD - you are the one that made first mention of Unity in this thread. The rest of us responded to YOUR comment about Unity. It was this specifically from post #7

That's because you are not up to date with this whole thing. Tomsamson came in here telling us how Unity would take over the world and this was 3 years ago. That year I told him that flash would still be the only option if you wanted to play in the browser market and that Unity would not even come close even to what Director did there.

Every time Unity announces something ( like Kongregate last year ) same thing happens. Back then I also said that Unity + Kongregate would amount to absolutely nothing and I was right. You couldn't find any Unity games there or anywhere else that mattered.

So no, I was right. And he obviously doesn't understand what I'm talking about.

What I'm saying is this:

#1. If you want to make a real 3d game and do not care how far you can spread it around the web, it would be stupid to use Flash, by all means go with Unity.

#2. If on the other hand you want to make a game and your primary aim is to have it instantly playable by everybody and spread around then it would be retarded to use Unity because it cannot give you exposure that flash can, not even close.

That was true 3 years ago and is still true today. Nothing has changed.

And if your goal is #1 I don't see the point of participating in any discussions on this flash forum. Flash cannot compete with Unity if that's your goal and Unity cannot compete if you fall under the #2 category. There is some overlap and it's at that high end niche part of the market you mention, but not enough to really merit a discussion. Unity is better for one thing and flash is hands down the best choice for the other.

[Pazil]

MikeMD, I'm sorry, but the discussion in this thread had nothing to do with what you're talking about.

Do you really need to try and prove yourself right dude? Seriously, we're all just web devs coming together, making our own predictions, bouncing ideas off each other. ****, it's not a race to see who's magic glass ball is better, what interested me and what I wanted to find out in this thread is people's experience using HTML5 and how it runs, how it compares to Flash, etc. etc., not bring back the same old Unity battle.

</unity>

On that note, thanks webgeek for actually sharing quite a bit of info on your tests. Do you have actual milliseconds for some benchmarks?

Also, it seems that HTML5 will/could take a large piece of Flashes place on the web, ads. HTML5 ads have the advantage (speaking from their point of view) that they can't be blocked, or at least it will be difficult to block them. Also, they'll probably load much faster than Flash ads, etc.

[tomsamson]

@MikeMD:

MikeMD, it is more than enough now.

Its ok when people have different views, but it is not ok when they reopen the same topics again and again just to bash a technology or person again and again, then don´t accept any other views and act as if others said things which they haven´t said just to prove their false points.

As webgeek said you were the one who brought up unity again in this thread stating:
"
Take it from somebody who told you 3 years ago that Unity will never amount to anything in the browser gaming arena and of course I was right.
"

That was then proven as being total nonsense by several members because unity is obviously amounting to quite something in the browser gaming arena by now.
It is used by a lot of major companies for some of the largest scale well paid projects around.

Ok, so then you have been proven wrong regarding that statement, what do you do next? Change your statement to act as if you meant something else.
So now it is about comparing things which can be spreaded around the net vs others. Ok, whatever, right?

What is not ok is that you try to act as if others said something different then, too.
Next time when you want to say tomsamson said this or that maybe go and look for a quote to prove it.

I have the stance for quite a while that there is not one technology which crushes all others to not exist anymore but its rather the case that there are various solutions to do something so as designer/developer who wants to save time and money or stay on the bleeding edge of possibilities or just look beyond the known boundaries it would make sense to try some other options in between to see if a particular one may be a better choice for some use case.

If your only use case is doing 2D web games which get revenue by spreading them all over the net and you see flash as only good solution for that, well, ok by me.

I have that stance for quite a while, hence why i got into trying and learning flash while flash was still not known by most people and likewise i learned all sorts of other languages, middleware solutions and other technologies over the years, so yeah, i can talk about upsides and downsides of various things and still use each for what it is useful for.
If you want to argue against that stance, go ahead, if you want to argue against another stance, don´t act as if it was mine without a quote.

Don´t try to bring up the unity topic again and again just to then act like people said different things than they did just to prove your point or act as you´d be the moderator here and have some kind of mandate of reminding everyone they shouldn´t talk about anything than flash games here as soon as it doesn´t fit to you to talk about unity anymore (after you brought up the topic yourself).

You know what, i´ll say it in direct way now:
people can talk about any semi game dev related topic here within reason, if you don´t like that, then get out.


I´m fed up of you bringing up old discussions again and again but then try to forbid anyone else talking about anything or stating any view that doesn´t fit your world view and also giving wrong semi quotes on what others might have said just because it fits to what you want to say.

[Incrue]

Noone said that Unity would entirely replace flash on the browser gamming arena, what we said is that Unity also has his space in this area and its growing every day

[Pazil]

Don't feed the fire guys!
Can we just put a period on Unity in this thread?

[tomsamson]

@Pazil: cool bringing the thread back to its actual topic again, regarding this:

"Also, it seems that HTML5 will/could take a large piece of Flashes place on the web, ads. HTML5 ads have the advantage (speaking from their point of view) that they can't be blocked, or at least it will be difficult to block them. Also, they'll probably load much faster than Flash ads, etc."


I totally agree that for a certain part of the advertising industry it is very important that html 5 ads can´t be blocked as easily as flash ads (well, not without often making the rest of the site not work well anymore either).

Regarding html5 ads loading faster or slower than the same content made with flash, it depends on what one does of course.
A few factors coming into play there:
-Flash movies are usually compressed, assets in them are compressed, flash supports quite a bunch of compression options for audio and video files so all that can help quite some with reducing filesize and load times. Next to that when doing vector graphics, depending on the content of the image, a full screen image can end up at a fraction of the size of a fullscreen raster graphic image file.
So in summary flash supports a lot of things to help creating smaller in filesize content.
-Most browsers support way less compression options for audio and video files and have no or lacking support for vector graphics handling, all of these can lead to way bigger files having to be used, next to that unless the server is set to deliver content gzipped or similar the html5 ads also don´t get that gzip treatment on top.
Overall right now for many types of 2D centric content one could get away with quite a bit smaller filesize results when doing them in flash.
-Despite the filesize of the assets due to compression, flash itself is usually a bit slower to load some external asset types than it can be done natively in the browser, for example let´s say you just load an external domain image into your player then flash first does things like doing a policy file check or similar things.

If you´re interested in what is the current state regarding html5 banner ads i suggest you check out some of the iAd banners on iOS devices.
With those quite a lot of the pros and cons can be seen quickly.
(For example they run on devices with capable html5 browser engine and one can do sorta nice things like image galleries, fancy menus, play videos and sound etc but then some sides still make a seasoned flash user think all this could have been done a bit smoother, a tad more interactive, in a bit less loading time and overall a bit more well rounded if it had been done using flash =)
There was also some moaning going on by some advertisers because there was no good workflow and tools for creating iAds for a while, so meanwhile Apple released iAds Producer:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/21/a...r-ios-devices/

)
Right now there just isn´t a single solution which is ideal for everything on every end, each has different pros and cons, so yeah, good to decide based on project, deploy target, target audience etc what is a good choice in that case.

[MikeMD]

You know very well what you said about Unity, I don't need nor care that much about this to go dig up some old thread.

As webgeek said you were the one who brought up unity again

It is perfectly relevant to HTML5 because it's the same thing all over again. This time around you are being scammed by people paid by Apple to put out fake reviews and hype. Neither of these two pose any threat whatsoever to flash when it comes to game development.

Unity poses no threat because it's a different segment of the market, and HTML5 poses no threat because it sucks.

I'm not arguing against any stances or whatever you call them, as a matter of fact I have repeated it over and over again ( even in the post above ), Unity is a better choice if you want to make 3D games and do not care about spreading them around, you just refuse to understand what I'm saying. There is nothing wrong with being able to develop games with flash and director and Unity and whatever else, even discuss it on a forum, but it's stupid to do so on a flash board and not say anything that's relevant to flash.

PS3 is a much more powerful platform than flash. We all know it is, but WTF does that have to do with this board? It's kind of like that.

Don't worry, you know I've been away for the entire year, within days I'll be gone again and you can go back to whatever you were doing without any opposition.

[tomsamson]

I think one can talk about the pros and cons of various technologies in nice way.
You see, i just posted somethings on html5 there without saying it will replace flash fully, just listed some pros and cons.
And something like that is perfectly fine to do here on this forum.
If someone wants to start a thread here talking about semi game dev related things in conjunction with html 5 or unity or udk or xna or x, why not, if you´re not interested in the topic, just ignore it.

If you have the stance that nothing else than flash should matter to a flash game developer or to someone browsing this forum, then yeah, ok, but don´t try to force others into having the same view.

[Pazil]

Actually you bring up a good point, I only assumed HTML5 would load faster because it doesn't need to init Flash VM stuff, and like you said, be checking policy files, etc. etc.
I generally have the "dirty" feeling if I visit a site made purely in Flash. It just seems slow by nature, rather than having the raw presentation of HTML5...

I did have a look at the iAd app (just quickly checked it out and read about it online), and I mean, for simple ads, it obviously looks pretty decent. I don't work in the ads industry, so I have a hard time understanding how much is really required from a tech point of view, or how much seems important. Like, is Flash being able to render a simple 3d scene that big of an advantage over HTML5, seeing that not many ads use 3d anyways?

P.

[tomsamson]

Actually you bring up a good point, I only assumed HTML5 would load faster because it doesn't need to init Flash VM stuff, and like you said, be checking policy files, etc. etc.
I generally have the "dirty" feeling if I visit a site made purely in Flash. It just seems slow by nature, rather than having the raw presentation of HTML5...

Yeah, its definately a case by case decission regarding websites where flash is a good or even better choice and where a worse one.
A few years ago it was easier to argue for flash for website usage because many browsers had more lacking CSS support, no proper custom font usage support and in some cases not even png graphics support.
Flash still is a great choice when it is about some kind of interactive and especially animated 2D media content delivery on various platforms, but yeah, there are a lot of factors to consider like which platforms it can run on and how nicely on those, if it can be indexed by search engines and tracked nicely without too much hassle, if what one wants to do plays nicely with adobe´s weird "security" system etc etc.
Right now a lot of things html5 is forced into being used for seem like html5 isn´t fully ready for some of those tasks yet, just like it can seem a bit weird when flash is used to for some kind of 3d stuff or a totally static web page with 3 images and a single standard font used =)

I did have a look at the iAd app (just quickly checked it out and read about it online), and I mean, for simple ads, it obviously looks pretty decent. I don't work in the ads industry, so I have a hard time understanding how much is really required from a tech point of view, or how much seems important. Like, is Flash being able to render a simple 3d scene that big of an advantage over HTML5, seeing that not many ads use 3d anyways?

P.

Yeah, interesting question. For banner ads 3d usage hasn´t mattered that much in most cases up to now, but for advertising websites or games it does more in many cases.
Before unity became en vogue for doing 3d stuff for more and more advertising sites and games a big chunk of the advertising industry tried hard to get 3d things done in flash using papervision, alternativa, away3d etc. Now it seems like there is one group which pushes hard on that end in flash, either with current flash capabilities or doing stuff for the molehill api beta player and then there´s another chunk which rather uses unity for the more highend 3d stuff and then there´s yet another group who ditches doing such more in depth 2D or 3D things in favor of doing more in comparison simple things in html/js in order to run well across all (especially portable) devices out there.

2011 will bring big shifts on all fronts there,
html5 adoption on browsers will get a big push, flash will get a (hopefully) way more powerful player version, unity will run in some browsers without the need for any plugin and all the major mobile platforms will get a new way more powerful revision which allows to run various things way nicer, next to smartphone and tablet adoption growing further exponentitally so that again portable device use and content tailored for it becomes more important.

As semi bottomline addition: I think next year will be the one where cross platform solutions like unity, udk, flash, html5 etc will really be used more than ever. How much each of those (and others) will be used for different types of content will vary from case to case, but yeah, the more platforms and device types there are out there, the more important it is to have options which allow catering to a good chunk of the platforms out there and have well running content at the end which does what it does nicely without leading to too much dev costs, time or hassle for developer and user.

[webgeek]

On that note, thanks webgeek for actually sharing quite a bit of info on your tests. Do you have actual milliseconds for some benchmarks?

Thanks but I don't - we didn't save anything like that. Here is one of our canvas tests just playing around:
http://thegoldenmule.com/labs/BlitDemo/blitTest.html
In Chrome, it's fast, in FF it's slow. It won't run in IE without Canvas. Flash would smoke this easily.

[Pazil]

God that's slow!

I guess milliseconds don't even matter if the slow down is SO big. I'm even surprised, and I wasn't expecting too great performance!

P.

[ImprisonedPride]

@webgeek
Under Ubuntu 10.10 with the latest versions of Firefox and Flash, that demo ran at a firm 37 fps. Hardly "slow" enough to worry about.


I'd just like to say that this thread is a great example of why the community has dwindled.

[tomsamson]

On my iMac i´m getting 10 fps with single canvas render type setting and 29 fps with canvas composite setting (Just tried it on Safari 5.0.3).
On the iPhone4 i'm getting 2 fps with single canvas and 3 with canvas composite :-)
Yeah, html5 canvas stuff is really pretty slow right now =)
In comparison one can run over 1000 particles or a 20k-40k model at pretty high framerate on iPhone (when doing it using a capable native app solution, not html 5 browser rendering of course).