Can A Flash Game Be Ported To iPhone App?

[ParadigmX]

Hi guys,

Back in '04 I created a Flash game -- and I want to take it to the iphone if it's possible. I'm not sure how, but I'm trying to see whether or not it's possible.

Does the iphone dev kit allow this to become possible?

Curious to see what you think. Thanks.

[VENGEANCE MX]

Sorry, but you'll have to learn Objective-C to write an iPhone game. If you're rich, you could buy the Unity devkit for iPhone (which is considerably easier to use than Objective-C). Failing that, you could write the game in JavaScript and trust the iPhone's web browser to handle it.

[Fall_X]

You don't have to be rich if you get the indie license for Unity.

I have ported one Flash game to Unity iPhone in a matter of hours. It wasn't a very complex game though (simple puzzle bobble variation). I stopped working on it because I had better ideas. But it's doable.

[tonypa]

You could use haXe as its similar to actionscript:
http://gamehaxe.com/2009/05/27/haxe-on-real-iphone/

[Sietjp]

Or you can learn objective C (1 week) and use a 2D game framework like COCOS2D ( www.cocos2d-iphone.org ) that is provided with many examples. I did it this way.

[Skribble_Style]

It's a common misconception that you need to know objective-c to program for the iPhone. You can program an app just fine using a variety of languages, from C++ to Java, but you require objective-c to access specific iPhone functions like the tilt sensor, music, gps, etc.

[samvillian]

My biggest struggle with iphone dev was connecting things from interface builder to the code. So much more complicated to me than needed. I still didn't master it.

[hatu]

You could use haXe as its similar to actionscript:
http://gamehaxe.com/2009/05/27/haxe-on-real-iphone/

This is probably the most interesting for Flash devs because you can almost compile the same code to Flash and iPhone. I does say that it runs at 2.5fps at the moment though

[Sietjp]

@hatu, I don't believe so, because each platforms have its specificities, and this is very important in game development to use them.

[Ray Beez]

Adobe is trying to bring "AIR" to the iphone, but who knows when that will happen (if ever)

[tomsamson]

while it would be nice to have an easy peasy propper working porting path from flash to iphone Adobe has basically already missed the boat by a lot, sure the iphone is still and will for a good while sell nicely but the initial goldrush time was totally missed by adobe (Whether that´s a bad thing is a different topic =) ). As the others said going for cocos2d r unity are your best bets for close to flash dev feel and semi feasable porting possibilities.

[hatu]

Also software rendering is a terrible idea on mobile devices so we would definitely need hw rendering first.

[tomsamson]

yeah, totally. Really, what the flash player needs most at this point is propper performance enhancment on the display side
(next to those people getting fired who work on the security sandbox side thinking its the right approach to enhancing security to constantly limit functionality more and more but that´s a different topic).
Before that´s the case i can´t imagine flash content running at any propper performance on the small devices for several more years.
That´s also why i think its a way better way to redo a game in cocos2d or unity than go for some haxe or other more "direct" porting path which comes at the cost of not being able to use the hardware acceleration for the display stuff which, well, just doesn´t fly on devices which have no fast cpu and/or few ram.

[Ray Beez]

You guys are totally missing the point that there are *political issues*. It's not "Adobe is teh dumb", or slow, or the device isn't fast enough (though its true it is not very fast, and any Flash support would likely not play everything very well).

No, Apple must approve all software that goes on their device. They have sold 50 million iphone & ipod touch devices. The app store has something like 75,000 apps, and sold $1.8 billion worth. Now imagine suddenly Flash is supported on the device. Tell me, would there be ANY reason for people to PAY for these $0.99-$4.99 simple games when they could just browse to free sites and play Flash games? Apple aren't stupid. It's mostly politics.

[tomsamson]

Man, sure there are political issues, there always are
I haven´t talked about that side (flash player running in the browser on the device hence maybe having negative effect on app store sales hence that could be one reason for apple blocking it) because the current flash (mobile) player runs way unstable and slow on mobile devices when used in a "native" "desktop" app on em. So using the flash player in the browser on them where the player naturally gets way less of the system ressources is even more ugly. Hence yeah, why i don´t think without a radical player improvement Adobe can play the politics card, cause as it is, if apple would allow the current flashlite player for desktop and browser use the playback performance would make most users wish it wasn´t there, not make em think "i don´t need the app store with full hardware supported apps anymore now that i got my mighty crash prone flashlite here"

Now of course if Adobe now somehow manages to surprisingly release a damn about time really well performing really well hardware accelerated for display operations mobile flash player that can run great at low memory and cpu requirements, well, if and when that happens, things would look a lot different.

Then suddenly the majority of people may ask for flash player support on their mobiles instead of varying between "hell,no, please not" and "i don´t care as long as it doesn´t crash".

Then there´s the side of Adobe politics to consider, too though:
Why doesn´t Adobe release a version of flash builder (formerly flex) and/or flash ide that allows to create Xcode projects to built native apps from flash projects (see how unity iPhone does it) ?
I think MANY flash platform developers would benefit A LOT from that.
Well, that side is politics, too, they´d probably rather have their flash platform developer base not be able to take part in the app store business than handing over the distribution control over to apple.