From Flash to Unity
Today marks a big change for JacksonDunstan.com and the Tip of the Week e-mail list. After writing about AS3, Flash, and AIR for five years and 317 articles, I’m going to start writing about C# and Unity3D. Today I have posted two articles. The first talks about why I’m switching from Flash to Unity and the second is the beginning of a series of transitional articles entitled From AS3 to C#. Read on for the first article.
My first reason for the change is the overall popularity of both Flash and Unity. Take a look at a Google Trends chart comparing “actionscript” to “Unity3D” since I started this site in 2009:
Flash started off over 30x more popular than Unity in 2009, but has since fallen so far that Unity is 3x larger than Flash. In other words, Flash has fallen by 92%. Here’s another chart showing the demise of Flash in the jobs market:
This chart doesn’t provide as exact of numbers, but eyeballing it looks like it’s gone from about 0.24 to about 0.02. That’s a drop that matches the Google Trends number: 92%.
Given that the Flash browser plugin is not available for the two important mobile platforms (iOS and Android) and that the overall shift is heavily away from desktops and toward mobile, Flash has all but disappeared from the web. Yes, there are still plenty of legacy Flash apps out there, but new development has virtually ceased. In fact, new development is usually geared toward replacing existing Flash apps with HTML5. The situation in the browser is grim.
That said, AIR does provide a nice solution for cross-platform (iOS and Android) mobile development that suits a few games and other apps quite well. But take a look at the Google Trends chart and it’s clear that Unity is now the preferred option.
So far I’ve discussed popularity and industry direction, but not the technology of the two platforms. Flash has seen declining investment over the last several years. It’s hard to tell from outside Adobe, but Flash seems to be on life support, receiving minimal updates by a much smaller development team. There is no longer any bright future for the technology, which was definitely the feeling in the days where every banner ad, game, and video player were unquestionably built with Flash Pro and Flash Builder on a Flash Player that was delivering more and more features that users and developers couldn’t get enough of.
Now let’s compare with the two technologies that ex-Flash developers have flocked to: HTML5 and Unity3D. HTML5 has exploded in popularity since 2010. A mad rush is on to replace everything Flash was once used for with HTML5. Tools, libraries, and communities have sprung up around it. There is a clear future of greater and greater adoption for HTML5 that promises to make the web better in every way. In short, it’s what Flash used to be but is no longer.
Unity3D, on the other hand, has risen to be the #1 games engine for mobile. It has a lesser—but growing—presence on consoles and web browsers, too. It’s cheap or free to use, has a large and growing community, and a vibrant suite of features and tools. It’s built on a language (C#) that is widely-adopted even beyond Unity, formally standardized, and documented extremely well. It’s receiving lots of investment from both Unity Technologies and third-parties via the Unity Asset Store. As such, it’s growing in feature set at a rapid pace.
As a game programmer, my path seems clear. Flash is not dead, as it’s popular to say, but certainly dying. The replacement game technology is Unity3D. Yes, HTML5 is used for games as well, but it’s nowhere near what Unity offers and nowhere near as popular as Google Trends shows again.
Which brings me to the plan for this site. I’ll be covering all sorts of topics related to Unity just as I have done with Flash over the last five years. Where you’ve seen AS3 articles you’ll now see C# articles. You may also see some articles about other .NET languages that Unity supports, like UnityScript and Boo. All of this begins today with the very first article in what’s sure to be quite a long series about the transition from Flash to Unity. So without further ado, head on over to read From AS3 to C#, Part 1: Class Basics!
#1 by Deril on July 21st, 2014 ·
Thanks for amazing AS3 post, and best of luck with you Unity and C#.
#2 by jimmah on July 21st, 2014 ·
Will Skyboy be converting too????????
#3 by Gayan on July 21st, 2014 ·
Flash will eventually die and I wish it would be because of its controversial decision to drop support for flash player, and AIR on Linux. And a company shouldn’t be able to control how www looks.
#4 by Stephane Beladaci on July 21st, 2014 ·
lol we have heard that for a decade, every single time a vendor try to push a cross platform to the market we hear the same sordid propaganda… Flash and AIR are not going anywhere, try that with any other technology and when you hit a billion install come back spread your nonsense, maybe we will believe you: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2014/04/air-app-installs-cross-a-billion.html
#5 by Boris on July 21st, 2014 ·
Flash has been dead since 2000. Didn’t you know that? But I’m still making money from it. Its a zombie tech.
BTW I develop in Unity3D too and for 2d games its a waste of time and output is too resource consuming. Also the multiplatform part of Unity3D goes only as far as development, while for export it doesn’t work.
#6 by Stephane Beladaci on July 21st, 2014 ·
First of all, your graph comparing ActionScript and Unity is not fair, you forget a mind blowing milestone: there has been more than a billion Adobe AIR app installs on mobile and desktop, and AIR apps are mostly built using AS3. I do not think Unity can claim such record, so I am questioning the reliability of your chart, especially coming from Google that is hustling the world to try to push their own cross platform technology, which could be a good idea except it does not work on IE. Go figure why.
Also, ActionScript being tightly coupled to Flash, it has been the victim of the biggest antitrust and corporate bullying scam in the entire history of Internet, made up by a stage clown who is now deceased and it is firing back big time as everyone realize HTML5 was a joke used to protect AppStore and iTunes and establish a racketeering 30% tax on the free web. But it is clearly coming back, jumping from 45th to 15th position in _independent_ programming languages classification from TIOBE: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html.
also had that discussion on Twitter with developers who use both Flash / AIR and Unity, while Unity seems to be a good option for games, it tuns out it is not the best choice for 2D, you can find part of those conversations here: “Unity3D is still really complicated as a multiplatform tool. You need Mac to export for iOs”: https://twitter.com/b4blue/status/484413123550777344, “Unity3D is a great tool, but is only an option. Air performs way better than Unity in 2D environments”, https://twitter.com/alesys_net/status/484412341132357634.
So I would believe Unity to be a good alternative to Flash Platform for apps when I will start seing news report like this (Olympics iOS and Android apps were built with Flash, Flex and AIR, therefore ActionScript 3, and made / saved NBC millions): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX0Wp6Gd-BA
#7 by jackson on July 21st, 2014 ·
I don’t mean to feed into a “Unity vs. Flash” fight, but I will respond to the points you’ve made regarding the data presented in the graphs.
The Google Trends graph compares Google search volume for the two keywords. It’s automatically generated by their tool and I very much doubt they’re faking the numbers for arbitrary keywords with highly-detailed information. Even so, the data is corroborated by the on-demand graph from Indeed.com, who is even less likely to be faking it.
As for the TIOBE link, if you click on the ActionScript link you can see that there’s a huge spike in 2014. Are we really to believe that Flash programming has suddenly become twice as popular as it was at its peak in 2009? If so, where are the hordes of ActionScript users that account for this spike? I think the data is wrong on that site.
#8 by Frank on July 21st, 2014 ·
That’s really sad, Jackson. I didn’t really comment too many times on your posts but they have been an incredible well of knowledge for me about AS3.
I actually began with Unity a few days ago, too, but I must say I am not really ‘that’ interested in games. I really hope sometimes I will still find some AS3 articles around here.
#9 by Jean-Marie PETIT on July 26th, 2014 ·
+1
Sad news.
#10 by flexwiz on July 21st, 2014 ·
While Unity by itself is a nice tool, and C# is a great language to code in, it’s not equivalent with Flash/AIR.
I did some Unity projects a few years back, and the first thing that hits you is that you are locked in their IDE and workflow, and instead of writing code you are supposed to drag and drop components. It’s a designer platform, and it’s not coder friendly.
Here are my own 2c regarding Unity.
Anyone who is a coder at heart would realize very soon that once you start to using Unity for your game you are no longer coding – bets case you will be writing tiny scripts. Again, nothing wrong with that but that isn’t real coding.
When you’ll need to create some UI for your game, prepare yourself for a lot of pain – when handling 2D UI, Unity is years behind Flash (or Starling/Feathers), even with their new uGUI thing in Unity 5.
#11 by jackson on July 21st, 2014 ·
One clarification, the new “new GUI” system will be out in 4.6, not 5.0.
As for being a designer’s tool rather than a programmer’s tool, I would never have adopted it if I thought that was the case. In fact, I think it’s highly analogous to Flash programming. You can write all your code on the timeline in Flash Pro and designers do that all the time. However you can also, as this site has shown over the course of virtually every one of its articles, write pure code files (
.as) and ignore Flash Pro. The Unity way of doing this is to create a single, emptyGameObjectand attach a.csscript to it. The class you write in that file is just like your rootSpritein Flash. You can go ahead and ignore the rest of the IDE’s features if you want. However, you’ll probably do what Flash programmers end up doing: use some of both. Let the programmers write code in MonoDevelop or Visual Studio and let the artists make assets and levels in the Unity editor.As I mentioned above, I’m not trying to persuade anyone to use Unity. I’m just pointing out that you can use it in a way that perhaps you hadn’t thought about.
#12 by Tee on July 21st, 2014 ·
First off, thanks so much for all your useful AS3 posts. I’ve really enjoyed the in-depth articles from you and i’ve have picked up really a bunch of nice info.
However, why does it feel like so many people just follow the “mainstream” hype that is around Unity these days. Yes, from a game development point of view Unity gives you a lot of new shiny tools maybe many flashdevelopers didn’t have before or just dont have the background from working with, and its easy to be dazzled. Unity is popular and hyped these days, and flash is a bad word to say out loud… But does this mean Unity really fills the shoes of flash? In my opinion..No… Not yet…..And im not certain it really ever will. Yes it has better tools for 3D games, but what about …general development? 2D? multiple platforms? App development? 2D Animation tools..etc.. Nop. And there is nothing wrong with C#, its a very good language. But so is Haxe.. and personally i like that option better. Or what about Unreal4 + Scaleform.. its quite awesome :)
I have 10 years of as3/dev/gui and 3D experience, and for me it still is a marvelous platform that i use every day with great success. I’ve done Unity work to but i’m not thrilled about it. Doesn’t feel as good. Unity 5 might improve things. We’ll see. That being said, i dont do web stuff anymore so its strictly AIR.
So hope you will throw in an as3 article now and then for your old faithful readers.. ;) Thanks!
#13 by jackson on July 21st, 2014 ·
You can check out all the 3D and 2D games and non-games on Unity’s showcase. They also have a video about the 2D animation system and tools.
And I just may write an occasional Flash/AS3 article from time to time. There’s no reason this needs to be a pure Unity blog. After all, I’ve written articles about JavaScript on this supposedly AS3 site on several occasions.
#14 by otomo on July 21st, 2014 ·
Hmm, i have to raise an eyebrow on unity3d being cheap or free to use as you wrote. Last time I checked in order to publish an app on desktop, android and ios, i would have to buy the pro package with ios Export and android export, two separate modules. Together this would cost me 4500 US Dollar. This ist hardly cheap.
AS3 might not be to most futureproof solution, but the overall package for developing games for browser and mobile without paying a dime seems still a great option to consider.
#15 by jackson on July 21st, 2014 ·
I suppose “cheap” is a relative term. Given that the median salary for a programmer in the USA is $74,280, I’d consider paying about 6% of one year’s salary to buy the tools to make your products to be pretty cheap. That’s not to say that I make the rules defining “cheap”. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion here.
#16 by HB on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Well, it’s not just about opinions, where I live the median salary is about $20,000 (some friends even get just $12,000!), and all the money goes to just life expenses, so yeah, for me $4500 is way expensive… and I do the same or more work than an American developer, if I hadn’t got a family to keep, or if it had a second source of incomes I’d try to work on my own, but life is not always fair…
I make a bit of server-side web programming, and a lot of mobile and desktop applications, a month ago decided to spend some time restudying my choices for mobile programming (from around 20 frameworks/technologies), and AIR still got the upper-hand. Xamarin would be more suited than Unity for my needs, but when I checked it, I found several things I didn’t like and a few problems with some features (plus several nice things as well, of course).
Language is not a problem for me, I’ve been a Flash developer for 8 years, I learned to develop mostly thanks to it, but I’ve done even more work with C#, expended equal time with Java, and worked with several other languages, so who knows, perhaps the next time I evaluate the landscape I also get off the ship, but not just yet.
#17 by lubo on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Typical american! The world is not USA, you know?
#18 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Well I’m an American who’s too lazy to look up and post the stats for every country in the world. Here’s a sampling though: (random, unverified searches)
UK: 47,500 GBP (~80993 USD)
Germany: 41,556 EUR (~55972 USD)
Japan: 5,184,995 JPY (~51053 USD)
Bulgaria: 24,347 EUR (~32793 USD)
In general, just type something like “software developer {country} salary” into Google and you can get the stats for whatever country you want.
#19 by lubo on July 22nd, 2014 ·
I am a software developer and my salary is 12000 EUR a year. This is roughly the average value at my place. To save around 3500 EUR for Unity I need 2-3 years. Cheap, eh?
#20 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
As I mentioned above, “cheap” is a relative term. It may not be cheap to you, but it’s cheap to others.
#21 by zeh on July 28th, 2014 ·
Not only that, but they’re adopting a subscription model where you can pay $75/month for pro, plus $75/month for each mobile platform one wants to export to.
And frankly I think one of the problems with Flash is that Adobe never quite understood how to profit from it, so the platform was always at the mercy of managers/shareholders/whoever. They’d sell the Flash IDE, for sure, but it was just a shitty visual editor that could be ignored for everything other than raw keyframed animation. As a professional AS3 developer I hadn’t been using the IDE for years. Not so with Unity: the IDE, and its extensibility, is one of the strongest points of the platforms, and the fact that they sell it actually makes me have more trust in the platform’s future.
#22 by Eduardo on July 21st, 2014 ·
Hi, i have read your site since last year a visited regulary, but only posted for the fist time a few weeks ago. I loved your as3 optimization test and tips. Best luck on Unity. I thinking on jumping ship soon to, now that its easier than ever to be a Wii U indie developer on Unity.
https://wiiu-developers.nintendo.com/
#23 by Jeff Ward on July 21st, 2014 ·
Unity3D gets a big fat “meh” from me. I’m sure C# is great, and your tutorials will be as insightful as ever. But Unity’s limited focus – while perhaps an ingredient for its success – is just what turns me off: the IDE is heavily designer-focused, and the whole platform is heavily game-focused.
Me, I’m a programmer* who largely cares about app development. So Unity was tailored for exactly not me. I’m sure in the Flash crowd there will be designers with some programming skills to whom Unity appeals perfectly.
Anyway, so long, and thanks for all the fish. *unsubscribe*
* Non-traditional, no CS degree, just a lazy hacker/prototyper with an eye for aesthetics and a desire for fast, sustainable x-platform development.
#24 by jackson on July 21st, 2014 ·
I certainly won’t try to persuade you to switch to Unity or keep reading this site, but I will point you to the plethora of non-games in the Unity gallery. I’ll also point you to my comment above talking about how the designer-friendly aspects can be ignored for a more programmer-centric approach to Unity development.
Best of luck to you, Jeff! :)
#25 by PA on July 22nd, 2014 ·
As an ActionScript programmer, part of my weekly routine has been to visit this blog and enjoy your latest article. Unfortunately neither C# nor Unity are on my roadmap, so it’s a big disappointment for me that the weekly ActionScript articles are ending. I echo what others have already said; I hope that there will be at least a few ActionScript articles down the road.
#26 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
I very well may post some AS3 articles from time to time, just like I’ve done with JavaScript over the years.
#27 by Tronster on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Bravo, looking forward to seeing your rigor applied to C#; I’ve already made the switch myself but have kept reading your AS3 analysis (one of the last Flash blogs I follow) as I’ve found them fascinating.
And who knows, with this language (and engine) maybe I’ll have something to contribute again and hit you up to do another guest article. ;)
#28 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Looks like you’ve already started writing about C#. :) Definitely hit me up if you want to do a guest article.
#29 by Redoc on July 22nd, 2014 ·
You can start by publishing that Unity is actually 10 times slower than Stage3D on mobiles, not to mention that even with all their fancy 2D tools its really bad workflow for creating anything 2D. Actually I would go as far as saying that they don’t really have true 2D support they are just faking it on top of 3D which is not good enough. Anyway even though I think you are jumping ship prematurely good luck.
#30 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Could you please provide a link with data showing that “Unity is actually 10 times slower than Stage3D”?
#31 by Eduardo on July 25th, 2014 ·
Hi, actually making that benchmark yousleft would be an awesome idea. Just like the Flash player vs JS in different browsers you did regularly in the past.
#32 by jackson on July 25th, 2014 ·
That’s an interesting idea. It’d be similar to “Flash vs. HTML5” articles like Stage3D vs. WebGL vs. AIR.
#33 by Thomas John on July 22nd, 2014 ·
hello
I just think comparing “actionscript” to “unity3d” is not really fair. Try comparing “adobe flash” against “unity3d” and you’ll have totally different results… Flash being way above unity.
I also think comparing trends doesn’t show the potential behind a platform.
And saying flash is not interesting anymore because updates are less frequent is again a very shady justification. Not to say “html5” is still behind flash in terms of support and capabilities, same for unity in 2d I believe (was the case a couple months ago)
Not to mention your statement: “Given that the Flash browser plugin is not available for the two important mobile platforms (iOS and Android)…”. I find that a bit misleading as I don’t believe unity has a web player for those platform either…
:) so I don’t want to start a war of justifications, I just find it sad that people have to justify their moves with that kind of justifications. You move to another language, fine ! no need to show trends and whatsoever. I change all the time, then come back to flash, then leave, etc…. no big deal. Big deal is how scared now we all are talking about flash or “leaving” flash. Steve Jobs did a really “good job” at manipulating people. He was a great manipulator but look at what it did. Now people are almost scared of flash. It’s terrible and very sad that just one guy can make most of people feel in a way or in another. There is no love in that, only fear. It’s sad.
Now, that being said, Unity is a great tool, really, I use it sometimes and it’s fun to play with. But don’t compare it to flash plz. Stop the “flash comparison” !!!! :)
and btw, thank you for all your articles, I looked at them many, many times, they were very useful. And I’ll also be watching for those c# articles.
#34 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
It’s definitely hard to come up with a fair comparison. One may not even be possible. I just did my best to compare from a developer’s perspective, not an end-user perspective. If you do a Google Trends search for “Adobe Flash” you can see that many of the “related searches” are about how to download Flash. The search volume is mostly end-users, so it doesn’t give a clear picture of development.
The Indeed.com graphs should be more developer-focused since no one is looking for job applicants that know how to use Flash as an end-user. Using “ActionScript” instead of “Adobe Flash” in the Google Trends should also cut it down to just the developers since end-users have almost never heard of AS. But then there’s the problem of cutting down the Unity figures to just developers. I don’t know of a good way, but perhaps you have a suggestion. Some charts that show a clear rise include “Unity programming” and “Unity C#”. The latter even shows Unity and Flash neck and neck.
Also, I never said “flash is not interesting anymore”. I also never compared HTML5’s support and capabilities to Flash.
As for the Flash browser plugin not being available on mobile, I mention that only as a major reason that Flash has declined. These days web sites need to work on mobile and Flash just doesn’t, so Flash development has given way to HTML5. This is not the case for Unity since it never had anywhere near Flash’s popularity with its browser plugin. Their efforts to get Unity running in Google Native Client, Flash, and HTML5 show that really clearly.
In any case, you’re quite welcome for all the articles and I’m glad to still have you as a reader (especially one who comments!). :)
#35 by herrbasan on July 22nd, 2014 ·
Since you focus is Game development, this is probably the right move for you. I personally mostly do multimedia installations for events, and i’ve yet to find a technology that is even a close match to what the rendering architecture of flash has to offer. Seamless mix of video, vector and pixel graphics that runs incredibly stable (my work usually has to run 24/7 for long streches of time, with just the right set of usefull API’s to connect it to other stuff (mostly stocket communication). And having the ability to target iOS, desktop and android from one code base is just mindblowingly awesome.
But then again, i have to hide the fact that it is flash. I actually started to use the little lie that i work in “Air” .. “what is that?” .. “something awesome that does all we need” .. “oh .. excellent”
When someone says “you know that this is flash” .. it brings people into a panic mode “oh .. that outdated stuff that never works, only runs on PC and steve hated” … then i go “you know that project such-and-such we did is flash too” … “yeah … but still … steve hated it”
So i try hard these days to steer people away from knowing what i actually work with … and just claim “it’s magic” .. that works best. But it’s a sad thing .. sooner or later i have to do things with architectures that make things formerly easy, hard .. but well .. as long i’m getting paid .. but for now .. i still do magic until someone forces me to do otherwise.
#36 by jackson on July 22nd, 2014 ·
You’re absolutely right that nothing beats Flash when it comes to combining vector graphics, bitmap graphics, and video. Flash is probably the right move for you if this combination is what you need. It just comes down to choosing the right tool for the job.
#37 by herrbasan on July 27th, 2014 ·
As i said, i’ll stick to what i think to be the superior solution as long as people let me. It is sad that one of the last resources for learning about AS is going away. In the end, the technology dies because of the lack of interest by people like you, who drove the interest in the first place. Can’t be helped, thanks for your time!
#38 by Jan on July 23rd, 2014 ·
It’s the unique AS3 blog I follow since I stopped to work with AS3 since three years ago. You made a awesome work here Jackson, continue the same in Unity3D platform.
Cheers,
Jan
#39 by CC on July 23rd, 2014 ·
Just wanted to say I look forward to your articles on Unity, and sorry for some of the vitriol you’re suffering as a result of your announcement. As a developer who does a lot with both platforms, I agree that Flash, while still capable, is dying. That’s particularly sad for me, since I have a pretty deep familiarity with it which is now feeling a little worthless (or at least not valued by the market). But things change, and Adobe hasn’t exactly been fighting the good fight for Flash, so perhaps a successor was inevitable.
In particular, I think your articles are going to really help smooth the transition for developers such as myself who are in the process of migrating over to Unity for the majority of their development. Your articles were really good at pointing out little-discussed best practices for wringing performance out of the tools we used, and as us ActionScript expats find ourselves in unfamiliar waters again, we’re going to get a lot of value out of your sober analysis, I suspect.
#40 by Alexander on July 27th, 2014 ·
Unity3D it is nice tool for a fast game prototyping and maybe for a complete projects.
C# it realy great programming language. I’m over 10 years programm with ActionsScript, Java, PHP but after first project with C# I fall in love. Now it my favorite.
#41 by Zeh on July 27th, 2014 ·
Nice! Looking forward to your posts.
#42 by BobTheCoolGuy on July 31st, 2014 ·
A sad post to read indeed. I think most of us here appreciate what Flash and AS3 was good at – working across a large variety of environments and having a solidly designed language and API in AS3 and the flash packages. It’ll be interesting to see where things go with regards to in-browser online games in the next 5 years or so. I’m not convinced Unity will ever become that big of a thing (but then again, I really have no idea what the market is like anymore).
Anyways, nostalgia for Flash is easy, but it’s probably time to move on. In the tech world, the old is almost always bad and the new always good, so might as well stay modern. But it’s sad to see it die because of what seems more like neglect than having lived a full life.
#43 by dimumurray on August 12th, 2014 ·
And the world marches on. Thanks for all your great AS3 articles over the years. Looking forward to your Unity/C# articles to come.
One request though; would you mind doing a series of articles on haxe/openfl, that effort seems pretty promising and I would love to read your take on it.
I too am in the process of learning Unity/C# but I wish its Entity/Component System architecture was more elegant (my standard being Richard Lord’s Ash framework – which incidentally has a haxe port). Come to think of it, I’d love to read your take on Entity/Component Architecture as well. Typically I find the focus of your articles to be on language performance, will the focus of your articles now shift to more game dev specific topics? (I’d love to see that by the way!)
#44 by jackson on August 12th, 2014 ·
You’re welcome for all the articles. :)
I probably won’t do any articles about Haxe or OpenFL as I’ll be focusing on Unity. I’ve used them before and can see how they’d make enticing alternatives to Flash or Unity, but just don’t think I’ll have the time to write about Unity and Haxe. Sorry.
As for more game dev-specific topics, that will almost certainly happen since Unity has so many apparently game-specific features. Then again, checking out the non-game section of their showcase reveals quite a few apps. For now I’ll be keeping it general with the From AS3 to C# series, but there will likely be quite a few game-specific articles down the line.
#45 by Vato on September 4th, 2014 ·
Very sad! I followed your posts and learned lot about as3 optimization. Hope you will continue as3 articles along Unity/C#
Unity C#/ AIR would be interesting too…
good luck
#46 by Yanick on September 10th, 2014 ·
Strange feeling for an old timer like me, reading all this… Eons ago, Director was put to death by a much less performant Flash still in it’s infancy, in pretty much the same way.
While it was agonizing, I would go to forums and read the same comments as on this one. I would also stare in dismay at the work of “Hypers” who were thrilled to showcase circles moving with a clic of a button, while I was able to create MIDI interfacing code and interactive 3d content for Shockwave…
The main arguments for Director programmers were “Flash is immature”, “Director is way faster” and “Director can do a lot more”. The Flashers arguments were mainly “Flash is the future, caus’ Director is old” & “Sure it can’t do most of what Director does, but look at those colourful vector base images!”…
In the end, hype killed granpa Director anyway.
Sounds familiar? What does it tells us?
It doesn’t matter that Flash development is superior in countless ways to current alternatives (HTML5 or Unity, just to name those 2): Hype is currently killing Flash.
Hype kills pretty much everything on the web, good or bad, sooner or later.
Maybe I’m just too old for all this now… :-)
#47 by Jerome on September 23rd, 2014 ·
Hi Jackson,
I’d like to share my experience in switching to Unity and also address some of the issues raised in the comments.
I started using Flash back in 1999 and was extremely reluctant to move to another platform. But about 4 years ago, I had to. Our main clients no longer wanted to buy Flash, so for about two years we struggled to find a new workflow.
We settled on Unity, Scaleform and MVC (usually PureMVC) for almost all our non-gaming projects. We create high-end 3D experiences that require highly dynamic and resolution independent 2D UIs, integrates sensors like Kinect, Leap and now the Rift. These apps run at tradeshows, with heavy uninterrupted use all day. We also do mobile apps, often on embedded Android devices with limited horsepower. Anything from phones to full HD and soon 4k! So keeping a vector based UI system was key.
Unity integrates perfectly with the 3D designers workflow and we retained our 2D UI tool chain, using Illustrator/Photoshop to Flash Pro/Flash Builder. We export SWF files (optionally they can be pre-processed into Scaleform’s GFX format for faster load). There is a solid communication API between Scaleform’s “flash” content and Unity. You can even use direct access to variables and objects in the SWF files directly from C#. No UI spritesheets or texture packing. We wire our apps with MVC and pull/push data to and from SQlite databases.
Most Unity devs that didn’t work with Flash will probably dislike Scaleform. But for those of us with a strong Flash background it just makes the transition that much easier.
Yes, Unity is expensive and Scaleform adds $300 per platform, but you get what you pay for. Unity is hot. Leap, Rift and every new tech supports it out of the box. The Unity team engages with their community and works tirelessly to better their platform. The Scaleform team at Autodesk has been amazing in supporting us and rolling out timely updates.
Welcome to Unity, it’s a great platform to work with and the community is awesome!
Cheers,
j.
#48 by jusopi on November 25th, 2014 ·
I’m late to this party (as usual) but one thing I would like to caution against for anyone doing research on ‘what’s hot’ or ‘Flash vs. Unity’ is that you are comparing two technologies where one has been long established as the prime of the web gaming realm for ages vs. the new kid on the block. That means that knowledge of Flash has been around a long time, resources have matured and thus probably don’t elicit so many vanilla queries on Google. This ties into the next ‘fact’ (for lack of a better word) that since the trend for the last few years has been to move away from Flash, it’s not going to attract many new users. Put another way: People who have been using Flash will probably stick with Flash, while those dipping their toes into the game development world will probably seek Unity. It’s kinda like comparing trends on gasoline autos vs electric autos… kinda.
I don’t know if I read this correctly but somewhere in the comments somebody mentioned making non-game applications with Unity. Folks, if you’re not making games, then chances are Unity is NOT the tool for you. There are plenty of mature frameworks available with very feature rich, performant APIs via HTML/JavaScript.
I’ll end in saying this somewhat unrelated comment. You see more and more developers rally for a change in JavaScript. The whole ECMAScript 6 proposal has JS looking more and more like… dare I say ActionScript? Classes, (real) modules, imports… it’s trying to morph into something it’s not but that so many developers wished it would be. This coupled with the fact that you have so many transcompiled sub-languages (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, AtScript, etc.) and you see things moving back into something the web already had back in 2008… AS3. I’ll just be happy when this circus ends and we can all worry more with WHAT we’re making rather than having to fart around with WHICH tools we need to make it.
#49 by Dave Mennenoh on November 6th, 2015 ·
Found this Googling Flash vs Unity… I’ve been a full-time AS3 developer for going on seven years now and have just started porting a Flash project over to Unity. Doing this to try and learn Unity… and so far I really don’t like it at all. Unity is so clunky and unrefined compared to Flash. Placing code onto objects feels like Flash 10 years ago and how AS2 did things. That was very ugly… and it’s just as ugly within Unity. The UI system in 5 is a joke compared to Flash. 2D is a joke compared to Flash.
I’m sure once I spend a couple of years in Unity it won’t feel so backwards but I feel it will take that long to learn such a poorly thought out IDE.
#50 by jackson on November 6th, 2015 ·
I too find coding via
MonoBehaviourdistasteful for most Unity work. I favor what I call the “pure code” approach whereMonoBehaviourclasses are only used when absolutely necessary, such as input gathering or Inspector pane integration.As for the UI, it’s definitely a far cry from Flash. That said, the new UI in Unity 5 is less than a year old and still in its infancy. There’s a lot of good extension work that’s been done and available on the Asset Store, so you might check there for projects that fill specific gaps. There’s also the famous NGUI project on the Asset Store, which is a fine alternative with a lot more history behind it.
It’s sort of the same story with 2D. The engine is called Unity3D for a reason: 3D is the focus. 2D was an afterthought layered on the 3D engine and supporting the Unity 5. Again, there’s some support from the community on the Asset Store to ease some of this pain.