A question on Flash v. Unity...

[151bitch]

I have been developing a game in flash for the past few months, and all the art and animations are made with vectors. I really like vectors because of the very smooth scaling and simplified shapes I use for my art style and it retains that classic "flash game"-ness. I love the idea that I could play my 2d game in 4k and still see everything crystal clear while keeping file sizes super low.

The biggest problem I've run into is performance, because I want the game to run at silky smooth 60fps.
The animation quality I've been shooting for is pretty high, and uses a lot of moving parts and highly detailed vectors (but no filters or blending effects). I've ditched v-cams in favor of scripted methods, done a ton of performance optimization caching certain items as bitmaps—but the biggest problem I've been having is keeping steady 60fps above 1440p on desktop computers. Now I know, most people will not play my game in 4k, but I can't play my game on anything but low quality without the framerate dipping into the lower 40s in 4k.

Being that flash games are sort of a dying breed and Adobe is backing away from the "flash" name, I don't think that adobe will be trying to improve the performance of flash games any time soon unless it's on AIR, and I don't want my flash games to be unplayable with retina screens in the next couple years.I was wondering if anyone has experience working with SVG or vector art in Unity. And/or if you work with Unity, how you feel about Unity's animation pipeline, using tools like Esoteric Spine to animate characters and objects. I love the smooth real-time animations you can achieve with Unity, but I don't know how possible that would be with an SVG importer, and if performance would suffer just as much as it does with flash. I really am loving flash, but I am at a point right now where if I wanted to switch gears on the engine, now would have be the time.

I'm also considering some kind of 'resolution-scaling' technique so that if you were to use a 4k or higher resolution, the UI would remain very clear while the animations and complex vectors in the scene would stay at a lower resolution, but I haven't been able to find any good information on resolution scaling in flash/AIR.

Any help you guys might have, I'd seriously appreciate it.

[KMiles]

At 3/8/17 02:13 AM, 151bitch wrote: I have been developing a game in flash for the past few months, and all the art and animations are made with vectors. I really like vectors because of the very smooth scaling and simplified shapes I use for my art style and it retains that classic "flash game"-ness. I love the idea that I could play my 2d game in 4k and still see everything crystal clear while keeping file sizes super low.

The biggest problem I've run into is performance, because I want the game to run at silky smooth 60fps.
The animation quality I've been shooting for is pretty high, and uses a lot of moving parts and highly detailed vectors (but no filters or blending effects). I've ditched v-cams in favor of scripted methods, done a ton of performance optimization caching certain items as bitmaps—but the biggest problem I've been having is keeping steady 60fps above 1440p on desktop computers. Now I know, most people will not play my game in 4k, but I can't play my game on anything but low quality without the framerate dipping into the lower 40s in 4k.

Being that flash games are sort of a dying breed and Adobe is backing away from the "flash" name, I don't think that adobe will be trying to improve the performance of flash games any time soon unless it's on AIR, and I don't want my flash games to be unplayable with retina screens in the next couple years.I was wondering if anyone has experience working with SVG or vector art in Unity. And/or if you work with Unity, how you feel about Unity's animation pipeline, using tools like Esoteric Spine to animate characters and objects. I love the smooth real-time animations you can achieve with Unity, but I don't know how possible that would be with an SVG importer, and if performance would suffer just as much as it does with flash. I really am loving flash, but I am at a point right now where if I wanted to switch gears on the engine, now would have be the time.

I'm also considering some kind of 'resolution-scaling' technique so that if you were to use a 4k or higher resolution, the UI would remain very clear while the animations and complex vectors in the scene would stay at a lower resolution, but I haven't been able to find any good information on resolution scaling in flash/AIR.

Any help you guys might have, I'd seriously appreciate it.

In my opinion Flash is still the best platform for vectors, but getting a good performance at a high framerate can be really demanding (depending on what kind of game you have). I'm about to publish a bullethell made with Flash and my partner had to pull of sorts of tricks to keep the screen filled and the framerates smooth.

That said, I'd still go with Flash (or HaxeFlixel if you want something similar) over Unity. It's a matter of preference more than anything, but mark my words, if you go from Flash to Unity you'll curse the animation system they use, it's awful and not at all well designed.

I find it so bad that in fact I usualy code my own animators to work in the same way as in Flash.

So those are my two cents, try to squeeze as much performance as you can (and sacrifice a bit if you must) to stay on Flash - or - try Haxe (which can handle swfs, among other things). Unity is not a bad engine, but it's meant as a 3D engine first, and it shows.