Why I Use Flash

There has been a lot of negative press about Flash lately, so I thought now would be the ideal time to take a look at why I am using Flash. Before I begin, though, I should first point out that much of the hatred of Flash seems to be oriented around Flash based ads. If you hate Flash for this reason then you are in desperate need for either medical help for your brain or are needing to learn critical thinking skills. Flash is used in advertising because it has the animation capabilities and interactivity that advertisers want and it is in use by over 90% of the browsing public. When HTML 5 becomes that dominant, then all the ads will be done in HTML 5 with its much slower JavaScript eating up processing cycles far worse than Flash ever could. As long as people do not want to pay for the content they are consuming (bandwidth may be cheap but the time to create the content certainly is not) then content creators need to find other ways of getting enough money to put food on their table and advertising is the dominant way of doing this.

The reason I use Flash for my games is that it is currently the best choice available. JavaScript is painful as different browsers run it differently and until HTML 5 it lacked a lot of the necessary capabilities such as the Canvas tag. Even after HTML 5, JavaScript is going to be annoying to work with, but I think that this is where things will eventually lead so I am slowly going to transition to it. Nobody wants to install plug-ins (especially from small companies like Blazing Games) so writing stuff in C is out of the question. This leave the option of relying on a plug-in that people will already have installed on their browser. The two choices here are Java and Flash. An upcoming choice may be Silverlight, which I dread as I do not trust Microsoft ("DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" among thousands of other reasons). I wish Unity was on this list but don't see this happening. If it does, then there may be a transition to that but since it uses JavaScript that won't be that big of a change.

I choose Flash over Java largely because Java stagnated and has more compatibility problems between versions than Flash. More important, at least for a game development perspective, is that Flash is a really powerful animation system. ActionScript, the language that Flash uses, is based on the ECMAScript standard that JavaScript is and is a pretty decent language. I do wish that it had better thread support like Java and more 3D support (there is some 3D support in Flash Player 10+ but it is very limited).