[casual_games] Game Authoring Language

[Charles Parcell]

I just wanted to chime in here about the Flash 8 bit. This actually 
spawns from another list...

Several people ran a very simple Flash 8 to Director 10.1 math 
calculation speed test. This was basically to see if Flash 8 was going 
to be able to handle more complex game logic with the inclusion of its 
new Imaging functions. What we found was that Director 10.1 was about 
335% faster than Flash 8 when doing simple math functions. Those math 
functions being sin, cos, tan, sqrt, and power. Nothing else was present 
in either of those projects so audio, images, etc are not a factor in 
the test.

In another test, Director 10.1 vs Flash 8 in simple language logic 
speed. Example of the Flash 8 code follows.

Flash 8 test code
-----------------
class test {
       public function test () {
               var t1:Number = getTimer();
               var x:Boolean = true;
               for (var i:Number = 0; i < 50000; i++) {
                       x = this.testFunction(x);
                       if (x) {
                               x = x;
                       } else {
                               x = x;
                       }
               }
               trace ("result = " + (getTimer() - t1) );
       }
       public function testFunction (x:Boolean):Boolean {
               x = not x;
               return x
       }
}

In this case, Director 10.1 was about 1300% faster than Flash 8.

A point to consider are that the Public Beta version of Flash 8 Player 
was used. Being a public beta version, it is assumed that there is 
little to no debugging code slowing the player down. It is also assumed 
that most code optimizations have already occurred.

I am not trying to slam Flash at all, but I did want to point out that 
ActionScript in Flash seems to be much slower than Director's Lingo 
language and thus I have very hard time understanding why some game 
developers praise Flash over Director/Shockwave. Lets not also forget 
that Director is able to be extended via Xtras for both authoring and 
runtime features. In addition, Director code is tokenized when compiled 
while Flash is not and is able to be reverse engineered.

I use both products on a day to day basis and am very happy that Imaging 
code has finally made it into Flash, but I will still continue to use 
Director/Shockwave as my primary game platform for both web and 
downloadable delivery.

Just a little something to consider.

Charles P.