I have a simple game that I am building in as3/air using flash develop, and I would like to be able to put it onto the iPad 3.
My question is, if I develop the app in a 1024 x 768 resolution, will it scale effectively when deployed onto an iPad 3?
All assets will be vector art, so losing quality from scaling isn't an issue.
if you publish it out to with the param fullscreen = true then it will automatically scale up. Though just be sure to optimize everything to the fullest extent as vectors are pretty processing intensive.
But it also depends on the version the SDK you're using, the newer air 3.3 sdk i believe supports it.
Related
A friend of mine has developed an excellent game using the starling framework. He is now wondering if he could port the game to FirefoxOS before he launches. The game is written in actionscript 3 and the starling framework project can build mobile packages for android and ios. It also can generate the flash file for the web (using flash player). Are there any paths for porting the game to FirefoxOS?
Someone suggested using shumway. If you know about this way, or any other path, please give a bief account of advantages/disadvantages. I am specially concerned about the performance, since the game in question has very high quality graphics. I think it needs to run in a GPU accelerated environment.
EaselJS uses a similar syntax to ActionScript; it has a Display List, Stage, Graphics and even Filters, this will make working with the canvas easier for us Flash developers.
I suggest you to port that game to EaselJS and TweenJS (both from CreateJS), I have used it to develop games for Firefox OS and worked quite well.
An advantage is that CreateJS now uses a WebGL renderer, but it also has a fall back to Context2D rendering if WebGL is not available. That would make your device more widely supported.
You will find all its features very explained in the following post from Mozilla Hacks. It has also some cool benchmarks to try it.
WebGL and CreateJS for FirefoxOS
Is there any way which can be adopted, to create cross platform responsive mobile apps using Flash Builder ?
We are using our custom written Resigning Engine for this purpose right now, but we tend to replace it with any generic Resigning tool or to cater responsiveness for all kind of devices/platforms.
Being on the same cross platform development, i.e. Flex, Action Script and MXML, is there any solution for this?
Thanks
It's possible deploy Flex-apps on Mobile devices, see Mobile app development
at Adobe Devnet more details
You definitely can develop Android and iOS apps using Adobe Air, Flex, AS3, MXML and publish them on Apple App Store and Google Play Store. But it's limited to these platforms, and Adobe is very unlikely to add any new platform to this list.
Pros:
it's really cross-platform. Once your application works on one, it's really easy to get it working on the other; so the development cost compared to native applications is much lower;
you may have some OS specific features/design; using by example OS specific CSS directives;
You perfectly may create an app with a responsive design, all tools are provided, but like for HTML/CSS, it requires a lot of work;
you may access all phone features (sensors, camera, etc...) using Adobe Native Extensions
Cons:
the size of the generated application: as it includes the AIR runtime, even a very simple app will weight around 12 Mb (9 for the runtime + 2.5 for Flex);
the performances are correct but not as good as those of native apps; one of the reasons is that Flex does not allow to use GPU for rendering (but Flex is not a framework for creating games);
it would be costly to get an app looking like a native one, as you would have to mimic all of native components. There was a project to do this (Eskimo), but it looks dead, and the components were not polished enough to be used in production when they stopped the development;
Adobe Native Extensions offer is rather limited, and they are quite tricky to write; (these drawbacks are not strong ones: you can write extensions, assuming you know to write native code; and most of the common features are available as ANE);
like with any other cross-platform technology, there are a few issues that you can't fix by yourself; you just can wait for Adobe to fix them when it's a problem in the compiler or the AIR runtime; hopefully they follow a 3 months release cycle since they launched AIR on mobile;
it runs on Android 2.3+ devices only; and only devices that are matching the minimal requirements defined for the AIR runtime; that is to say, most of the smartphones and tablets, except cheap ones like ZTE products. When a device is not considered as powerful enough by adobe, the AIR based apps are not displayed in the stores.
Some recommendations:
The best way to organize your code is to create a project for each OS, with specifics assets (icons by example) and a specific manifest file (app.xml), and put all of your application code in a library used by these two projects. It will allow you to test your code (Flex mobile project can't be unit tested), and will avoid you permanent modifications of the manifest.
Worflow: it's usually faster to develop for Android, and then adapt you app for iOS, because it's faster to deploy and test on Android device (although you may use the Adobe Simulator most of the time).
Use the latest release of Apache Flex; it handles the high resolution devices. Forget Adobe's release (4.7 and lower)
Test quickly and often on mobile, especially for the responsive aspects.
Use FXG instead of bitmap graphics each time it's possible (i.e. if they arent animated); it's lighter and very easy to scale.
Mad Components
Alternatively, you may consider using Mad Components instead of Flex.
Flex was not designed for mobile at first; MC was. So it's faster (looks like native), and much lighter (although you still need the embedded AIR runtime which weights 9 Mb).
We are looking to make a mobile game that hits every platform. We want our remote graphic desingers to be able to easily see how their artwork looks in the game on lots of different devices. Is it there some program for this that you can stick an apk or ipa file into, and you can customize the simulated device to play it?
You can export a windows AIR app and have it cycle through desired resolutions on some hotkey, that would probably be the simplest. Alternatively you can go with a solution like Genymotion Android vitual machines, have them locally download a bunch of virtual machines and test it that way.
Mind you, that won't let the designers change the graphics on the fly and see how they look if that's what you had in mind, that would be a whole different situation. Also emulators won't let you gauge performance on different devices, they generally don't provide real world performance.
I am a newbie to the libGDX game development framework.
Can anybody explain the purpose of the "desktop" application? Is it necessary to create a "desktop" application for my android application? Is it because the class which launches my main application is in my desktop application?
Sorry for asking such lame questions. Kindly help me out and clear my basic understanding regarding such things.
Thanks in advance!
The purpose of the library the way it's designed is to allow you to create all of your game logic in a way that doesn't depend on the platform. That way your game can run on Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android.
As a result you can run your game while you're testing right on your desktop, saving you from having to package an APK and deploy it to an Android emulator or device. Your development goes much quicker that way (plus you get free support for platforms other than Android).
When developing with LibGdx you have one main project, which holds all you platform independent code (like 99% of code) and you have projects for other platforms, which are typically just one class. So, beside that main project you must have at least one more, platform dependent. And if you are using assets you must have android since assets (graphics, sounds, fonts) must be placed there. Having desktop project is nice to have, as Odat said, for testing - you can run your desktop app much faster and i.e. make screenshots, maybe record it as video....
For android or iOS development use your Desktop project for rapid development of your game mechanics. Load time is a fraction of the Android build and launch and much quicker than the emulator. Debugging is much quicker to setup and run in the Desktop project.
You can quickly add bits to your game and get immediate feedback on how it works.
Of course many people release fully functioning games with only a Desktop version. Tools even exists to package them with installers!
This month I started to play with Flash Builder because I don't have a mac to create native iPhone apps.
I have made a Flex Mobile Project and an AS3 Mobile project. Both do mostly exact the same and I see great differences in operation speed (AS3 version is much faster). Also the size of the AS3 version is less than the size of the Flex version when I deploy the project.
But one thing disappoints me, the size of a deployed AS3 app (Android) is still about 8MB. I think that is quite huge for a simple app, or is it normal? I did not test the iOS version because I am not an Apple Developer member (is there a trick to deploy an iOS app with fake certificates)?
Resources I have used in the apps:
Two images approx. 35kb in size
A StageWebView
I want to know:
What is the average size of a simple app when it is a native app (apk file)?
What is the difference between an AS3 app and a Flex app except the libraries that re used?
Is the AS3 app converted to C or another language?
Why is the apk so huge (IMO)?
Is there a trick to deploy an iOS app with fake certificates? (just for testing)
Thanks for the answer(s).
What is the average size of a simple app when it is native app (apk file)?
I have no idea. When you were comparing sizes; did you export a release build or a debug version? The full version of my app; using Captive Runtime is 12MB. That includes all the embedded images. I thought that roughly 8MB is the size of the embedded runtime. Of course, if you don't use Captive Runtime then the app will be smaller; but it will have a depency on the user having the runtime installed.
What is the difference between an AS3 app and a Flex app except the libraries that are used?
For all intents and purposes nothing. The Flex Framework will need to execute code to setup the framework and such. In theory this 'impact' is offset by the value that the framework brings.
- Is the AS3 app converted to C or other language?
Not for Android or Playbook. It relies on the Mobile AIR Runtime--which I assume is written as a native app somehow. For iOS there is a more in depth conversion taking place; but no on knows the exact magic sauce; but it the process is much more intensive than Android or Playbook and people believe that your code and the AIR Runtime is converted to Objective C somehow in a way that is not in violation of the Apple licensing agreement.
Why is the apk so huge (IMO)?
Huge is open to interpretation. Without seeing your full app code; it's tough to judge.
Is there a trick to deploy an iOS app with fake certificates? (just for testing)
I don't think so; although there may be possibilities on unlocked devices.
You would like to use Mobile AS3 Project if you want you apps to be smaller and your GUI mainly contains vector graphics and Mobile Flex Project if you prefer to use standart GUI Controls that comes together with Flex framework but adds overhead in size because of controls that come with it.
As of the other questions:
the size of the apps is different on mobile platforms. Typical iOS app is about 2MB - 20MB. It really depends on resources you store with your app. What might be important to you is not to overcome 20MB if not needed because 20MB+ apps require Wi-Fi connection to be downloaded.
(However you should export release build version only as mentioned by www.Flextras.com)
there is no fundamental difference between AS3 and Flex apps - they both compile to the same instructions that executes on targeted mobile platform.
as far as I know (being iOS developer myself) there is no workaround to deploy an iOS apps. You need to use Mac and become Apple Developer to deploy with valid certificate.
to make your app smaller try to pai special attention to the resources you add to the project. Although I believe the size is so big because of framework itself, you would like to use more vector graphics vs. bitmaps when compiling apps with Flash/Flex.
When you export for Android you have an option of embedding the air framework in the application, that way your users don't have to download air. you can export your application without air embed which will result in a much lighter application, however your users will need to download air runtime. http://cookbooks.adobe.com/post_How_do_I_create_an_AIR_application_for_Android_tha-19299.html