I would like to develop a Tamagotchi game for Windows Phone 8 and I don't know how to do it.
My problem is that I don't know if I need to use Directx 3D or XAML, because I'm going to show a 2D pet moving around the screen.
I've thought to use 2D sprites to show its movement and let the user to stroke it.
Do I have to use Direct3D? Unity? What do you recommend me?
I wouldn't use XAML for a game. If you're going to be doing animations and complex interactions, that would be a nightmare. You can, however, use it for your game menus and layouts. Check out this tutorial on XAML and Direct3D apps for Windows Phone 8
Unity doesn't automatically make the game 3D, you can create 2D games with it. XNA is being phased out, so I suggest you stay away from that. Go with Unity for your engine.
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I have several games that were built 800*600 and need to convert them to run on the iPhone.
Are there any "easy" frameworks to convert the application without having to create all new images for Flash/AS3?
I was reading about starling but I don't see any way to easily convert our application witout rewriting a lot of it.
Thanks.
It totally depends on your existing games. If they use a lot of vector graphics and full screen animation, performance will become an issue. But if you use a lot of bitmaps already, and not much animation, you might get away with just porting your games to AIR.
Flash CC has options to export assets to Bitmaps even if they were created using vectors ("Export as Bitmap").
You can optimize performance by using cacheAsBitmap on certain graphics (also look at cacheAsBitmapMatrix) but there you will enter rewrite territory.
I'm making a flash app for AIR. The app is mostly made, but I'm not happy with rendering speed on mobile (render mode - gpu).
I know there is a framework that allows user-friendly way to work with Stage3d called Starling, but I've never used it.
After looking into it and following through some tutorials I've noticed that I need to rename all package flash default classes, e.g flash.display.DisplayObject -> starling.display.DisplayObject.
But such action might be destructive to my code base, plus, I have other frameworks attached that work with some flash package classes.
Is there a way to attach Starling to a complete project without re-naming all the package names, changing assets and re-factoring all frameworks that work with default AIR API?
If you're thinking of switching to Starling, you'll have to redesign your whole rendering code. Starling is no drop-in solution. Just renaming classes in your existing code will not do because it completely replaces flash display list for Direct3D, which does all it's rendering with GPU, with all the differences it brings: bitmapped graphics, texture atlases, careful draw ordering. Learning curve can be a bit steep in the beginning but once you get familiar with basic concepts it's a breeze to work with.
IMHO, it's well worth the effort, especially on mobile. Code that ran in low 10s of FPS in classic display list can easily be made to run at solid 60fps with Starling. Basically, for flash on mobile, Stage3D is the only game in town. And Starling is the best supported and widely accepted framework for 2D stuff on Stage3D, with lots of supporting libraries and a very helpful community of developers.
Go on, take the plunge, you won't regret it.
You can run Starling and a native flash application layer at the same time but it wouldn't give you an optimum experience.
If you want to take full advantage of the gpu acceleration of Stage3d and Starling though it would be preferable to refactor your existing code to use Starling display objects rather than Flash display objects.
You might want to post this question on the Starling forum, they are very helpful guys and it's a thriving developer community! - http://forum.starling-framework.org
I have a nice setup where I publish, compile, design, etc. in Flash Pro CS5.5 and write as3 code (and some xml) in Sulbime Text 2.
Being forced to import each image or generate a sprite sheet seems like a such a hassle for nothing.
My apk apps work fine use mouse events, so what's the point in switching to starling?
I can answer you with 3 letters FPS.
You are getting a big boost in performance as you are working with law level API of Adobe Stage3D. And you do not need to worry about how to handle it because starling is warping it for you with nice 2D game Engine.
I suggest you to work with Starling for core game development and Gazman SDK for UI.
How ever there is one problem with starling. It does not have native support for vectors, so scaling could be a problem in many cases, spatially when building android application that you want to support in many screen resolutions. You can read this post about starling solution for that problem.
My colleague and me made an HTML 5 iPad game ( http://braille.gandzo.com/ ) and we would like to upgrade it, and our framweork is not enoguh, for what we want. Some of the things we would change are: graphics update, animations/"effects", multi-player, achievements and so on. The game would stay 2d. Now, as far as I understand, both Unity and Cocos would be good for this task, with Unity having the advantage of being multi-platform.
What I want to know is are there unknown qualites/"flaws" to these two programs which would influence my decision (maybe even by choosing something else). Examples that come to mind are "Unity is too complicated/has too much unneeded options/hoops because it's made with 3d in mind" or "Cocos is significantly more suited for 2d games".
If the game is pretty much in 2d... I would suggest for cocos2d. I am working on cocos2d for past 1 and half years... I don't have experience in Unity but ya my colleagues who used to work on Unity had so many problems with animation, texturing etc.
BTW I was not able to play you game on my Chrome. :)
I'm new to 3D, so asking for help. I need to make walking simulator on AS3: first-person view, moving through rooms and corridors. I don't need any physics, only moving and looking. Could someone tell me, what's the best actionscript-3 3d framework to implement needed functionality? Explanation is welcome :) Thanks!
Away3D. Best open source (and probably best of all) 3D engine on flash. You can either do this using the old away3D version for flash player 10 and under, or using away3D for the new Molehill 3D api's. Links:
Away3D 4.0 (Molehill APIS)
http://away3d.com/
Away3D 3.5 For Flash 10 and under
http://away3d.com/away3d-3-5-0-2-5-0-released
Post on an animated walk-cycle done programatically in real-time using (I believe) away3d. Also discusses pros/cons somewhat of away3d.
http://www.everyday3d.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/09/making-things-walk-in-flash-3d/
Also the away3D SVN is packed full of demo's with source code for all of these things you see in the links + much more.
http://code.google.com/p/away3d/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk
Note that the broomstick branch in the trunk is the away3D 4.0 branch, targeting the beta flash player 11. More NFO on that here:
http://blog.ascensionsystems.ca/?p=147
I see that Away 3d has been mentioned already
the other options are Alternativa and nd3d
beyond that you might want to look into flare3d and unity3d.
Papervision looks like it's not keeping with times, but pretty similar to away3d, more resources()tutorials), but no molehill APIs