Flash features that get no love

[Ray Beez]

Looking at some of the cool AS3 games with whacked out visuals (hi Allim!) had me thinking... there are some Flash features that just aren't getting any love these days. You could even say they've been forgotten. (Or I just don't check out enough Flash games)

1. Displacement mapping! Where are my games with displacement map effects? This feature has been around at least since 2006 now! Where are the obvious "fishing" games? Why isnt the effect used in all those Geometry Wars rip-offs?

Allim, your crazy pill popping game could use some psychedelic displacement warping!

2. Inverse Kinematics / Bones. THis is newer, but where are the games with unique boned characters or IK interaction??

3. Add to this list!

[Orkahm52]

Nice idea. It would be fun to try to make a game that incorporates every item on this list.

Displacement map filters can get some sweet effects. I once made a crazy psuedo-3D loop racing game using just a single constant displacement map.

3. Webcams

I might be just avoiding cool webcam games, as I don't actually have a webcam. As seen in the 4k games competition a while back it's not that hard to make effective games using webcams as the controls.

Although as I said above, I don't have a webcam so I only have other people's reactions to go on, which as far as I have seen is pretty positive.

[tonypa]

1. Nobody understand how to use those filters. To have people using features in their games, they should be simple and logical. Plus, every layer of filters is possible cause of extra lag and another wave comments about "flash game causes my computer to crash".

2. F10/AS3 only. Plus its not possible to create or modify through code and have interactive IK/bones. I am sure animators could use IK if they would ever switch over to work with AS3 but for games they are useless.

F11 has also number of potentially cool features that could fail. iPhone publishing sounds nice but has awful perfomance and number of annoying restrictions. Time spent on fine-tuning your Flash game to run on iPhone could be better spent rewriting it as native iPhone game.

[tomsamson]

I agree with tonypa, the majority of the flash userbase never switched to AS3 so any feature only accessible through that is already a no go.
Then for many more visual oriented people its unintuitive to not have a visual workflow in the ide to get visual effects done (like the displacement filter stuff discussed here)
and then since adobe is letting most graphical things be handled by the cpu alone they run at sucky performance and for most things one has to decide whether they will run fast enough on an average machine when the rest of the game is going on.

I was very excited about the theoretical endless possibilities on visual side around when flash 8 came out but all these shortcomings and meanwhile knowing that Adobe is not doing the right actions to improve those things has made me loose motivation to even dabble with new effects in flash and i use other tech for that instead.

I can´t talk that much about Flash 11 until it comes out so i´ll leave it at i totally agree with tonypa and anyone who wants to make iPhone games or ones for other platforms other than pc and mac should seriously consider using something else than flash.

[Squize]

Aside from displacement maps being a black art, they're painfully slow. I've got a bump mapping effect on the title screen of my current game that I can only run with just a logo and some buttons.
I'd love to use dmaps in game for a heat shimmer effect but it's not even worth the effort of trying it as it will just kill the game.

Pixel Bender is under-used and is surprisingly quick. There's a lot of potential with it.

Squize.

[tomsamson]

Yeah, as i said i had the same exact experience with the standard filter/bimtpadata functionality as you.
At first its fun to dabble around with it some but when one does the really involved stuff one quickly gets to the point where it just doesn´t run fast enough anymore, especially in a game scenario where way more things are going on.
That´s why the really exciting flash effects stuff is usually restricted to a demo app where a single effect runs in a small window.
I´ve had it many times that i´d work lengthy on some cool effect and then waste hours on optimizing it to then have to accept that hey, if i leave that in the game it just won´t run fast enough on the average pc.

Regarding Pixel Bender i think its a showcase example for why Adobe is loosing the creative crowd more and senior flash users more and more just like beginners:
Yes, compared to the usual performance of flash doing such things the performance when done using pixel bender is a good bit better. But compared to anything possible in many other technologies its still very bad. And when one then considers one has to code in an Adobe proprietary C syntax instead of being able to code in C# or way more simple Javascript in other technologies, well, you can see why it never took off in big way.

For me, since i saw how one can run wicked fullscreen effects in xna, unity and other technologies at over 60 fps on an average machine there´s just no coming back anymore to trying to optimize an in comparison laughably basic effect in flash for hours to run acceptable in small window area at 30 fps or less on a highend pc.

[dandylion13]

Hey Everyone

Interesting discussion.
I think that part of the problem is that the trend in recent years is that Adobe's engineers are giving programmers "low-level access" to the minutia of code without API's to make them usable.
I think they expect the "community" (us) to make these API's, which sometimes we do (Papervision) but more often we don't.

Is anyone aware that FP10 has a new "text engine"?
I spent a few futile days playing around with it until I realized that I was simply building an API which duplicated the existing functionality of the existing flash.text package.
And then I discovered that Adobe acutally has its own API for the text engine (the Text Layout Framework) but this has been gathering dust in beta for more than a year and I've never heard of anyone ever using it.

[mr_malee]

dynamic sound perhaps. Sure some do it, but its not very mainstream yet

[alillm]

Yea I love messing with effects but unfortunately they can be very slow. It would be very cool to see some games that do push such features to the max though.

Ali

[bluemagica]

Well the features that are beneficial to designs, are already being pushed by various devs, but most of the features which "gets no love", are almost unusable in a practical situation. They are not only too slow , or too heavy on resources to implement, but those type of effects can often be achieved through other means.

What I personally would love to see and play with are the new pixelbender features. I read a few tutorials on the web, and the ability to create many effects seems quite neat, and much more resource friendly than some of the advanced built-in effects of flash.

[justkevin]

Displacement filters are cool. While expensive, they're not so bad that you couldn't use them as your game's main eye candy, or to provide animation to small areas. I think the problem is that they're intimidating. I think if Adobe added a few pictures to their docs, people would get how to use them-- the fact that you need to arbitrary pick colors as the x & y displacement values is a little confusing. If developers saw a picture, and then a red and green color map, then the end result, they'd understand it better.

I just started playing with PixelBender and while it is neat, it suffers from some big drawbacks:

1.) The Toolkit IDE isn't very good: It doesn't have much beyond the most basic code hinting. It doesn't remember where you last exported your filter to. Incredibly, there's no way to stop a filter once you've started it running. If you want to do a performance benchmark in Flash without the filter running in the toolkit, you need to close the Toolkit.
2.) Performance is a lot better than manually manipulating pixels, but way worse than internal filters. A simple PB shader that just does linear sampling on a bitmap takes about as long as applying a BlurFilter, one of the most expensive operations in Actionscript.

[Squize]

Yeah the toolkit feels very beta right now.

I've not used a PB kernal as a filter yet, I've heard you're not any better off using them that way, I just use them as a shaderJob ( Is even that the right term ? Lots of things in my head atm ).

Squize.

[mr_malee]

that toolkit is a waste of time. It crashes so much and has less memory than a goldfish.

There's a Flex/FDT plug in that is much better and has code hints. Only problem is no preview.

[Squize]

I've not had a crash on the mac yet, but I was playing with a simple bloom effect the other day and when bumping it up to take account of the alpha channel as well I got a warning saying it was running slowly, which is bizarre as it normally runs along at 400fps.

Squize.

[Incrue]

Noboy uses IK because its ugly
And, as for me, i hated it, the way its made to use goes against everything flash used to be, you cant drag keyframes anymore, how can a animator work with that?
And, for the next flash, as Adobe is full of genious, what they will do? Ik with physics

[tonypa]

Yes, they have already shown F11 has some sort of built-in physics.