how much has changed?

[iameatingjam]

I used to love making flash games as a teenager, but I lost motivation when a game I had spent months on got deleted in a computer crash. I recently went through and revisited all my old games and it made me wants to get back in to actionscript! However, its been a good 5 years since the last time I made any flash, could someone bring me up to speed on what has changed/what is possible now?

Does anybody still use AS2? Should I relearn 2 since I am familiar with it, or jump into 3?

Thanks for the help.

[4urentertainment]

I don't think that much has changed from a development point of view (the bar of quality of flash games has certainly risen though!)

I would definitely recommend you to learn AS3 instead of AS2. There are really only minor syntax changes between the languages, and AS3 just forces you to code better, and you'll really appreciate it in the long run. AS2 is more or less obsolete at this point, so it wouldn't be recommended.

[64base]

Let's see:

1. Stage3D
2. Hardware-acceleration
3. Transition from Vector->rasterized/blitted graphics
4. Support for new input devices (touchscreen, accelerometer, camera, GPS etc.)
5. Matured API

I guess you can say "not much".

[kkots]

You forgot packages containing multiple classes and namespaces.

[4urentertainment]

At 7/1/13 04:40 AM, 64base wrote: Let's see:

1. Stage3D
2. Hardware-acceleration
3. Transition from Vector->rasterized/blitted graphics
4. Support for new input devices (touchscreen, accelerometer, camera, GPS etc.)
5. Matured API

I guess you can say "not much".

Oh yeah, that too!

[iameatingjam]

How intimidating... I hope I can be persistent .

Thanks for the help!

[milchreis]

At 7/3/13 09:24 PM, iameatingjam wrote: How intimidating... I hope I can be persistent .

All mentioned features are optional and not necessary for every flash application.

[kkots]

At 7/4/13 04:12 AM, milchreis wrote: All mentioned features are optional and not necessary for every flash application.

Exactly. When ActionScript 3 comes down to basic, trivial code, it is as hard as any other programming language, including ActionScript 2.0.

Overall, ActionScript 2.0 is better used for making buttons which do trivial tasks, like stopping a movie, going to a website, playing a movie, loading an mp3 sound from somewhere and playing/pausing it, making advertisements.

However, if you are a real programmer, you're working on serious large complex projects, or you'd like to become a real programmer in future, then you must use ActionScript 3.0, because ActionScript 2.0 is disappointingly limited and glitchy in all directions possible to imagine.