ok, folks. I've listened and read. It now time to hold a thread debate on which is the best program to use for ONLINE GAME CREATION. Yeah! everyone knows about Adobe Flash! let's talk about how it is dead, and the new upcoming programs that are replacing it. OK???? Research Microsoft SilverLight and Multimedia Fusion 2 ... oh and what about all the online game editors that are starting to appear?? Serious comments and well thought out .... go to another thread to earn points.
The best game editor for online games is not an editor or a program, it's a language and it's called C++. Sooner or later your gonna have to face it, you have to learn how to program to make what you want. Don't get me talking about Adobe's new 'competition' if you can even call it that.
Oh wait, are you talking about games like the ones on this site? I thought you meant like MMOGs. Well for one, Silverlight requires a download. People don't like that. I can't really figure out how it all works. I don't know what it will be capable of or how efficient it will be. From what I've read about MMF, it isn't supported in the browser.
Touche, and excellent point! So then, Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree as far as online gaming is concerned. Good! And if MMF isn't supported in a browser, then that leaves Java or Director.
Now you're starting to think ... and this is excellent stuff ... more please!
The browser game market isn't very big so I doubt any new technology soon. However, the games market in general is a booming market. There are newer tools that are easy for independent game developers to get out in to the real world. Tools like Torque and XNA are great for small teams of developers to get their stuff out there.
Yes the game market isn't very big ... only $6 billion! Larger than the movie and music industy combined!!! You ARE right about any new technology on the horizon; but I have heard about the new "jumboPacket" with a tera-byte of data in development.
Excellent point about XNA! I have heard that xbox this year is allowing game devleopers to sell their own games and Wii is doing the same thing across their marketing distribution channels. If fact, you mentioned TORQUE who has a game development platform for XNA! Excellent research!!! I've also learned that Wii will allow Flash games to be uploaded and access across their network. WOW! Great dialog . . . what else do you know????
I would like it if younger kids who aren't in high-school yet such as myself have a website to which a kid could just fool around and not get any credit for what he/she does on this specific website.(also anyone interested in being my friend just send a comment my way!):}!
Why dismiss Silverlight so handily? Just because it requires plugin? So does Flash... and Quicktime... and Shockwave... In my personal experience, the SilverLight plugin is painless to load. It's a single click (yes I want it)... done. No browser restart. No system reboot. Very slick.
Also you can expect that MS will ship SilverLight with IE when IE8 ships (whenever that may be) or for IE7 SP1. Very quickly the Silverlight plugin will become ubiquitous (on machines with IE, which is most). Silverlight also works well with Firefox and on Safari. Coming soon for FF on Linux. MS has learned not to hobble its stuff for just IE. That's a step in the right direction.
The other interesting thing about Silverlight is that it is running on a fully compatible subset of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which is the XAML-based GUI engine for Vista (also runs on XP with download). That means that SL games for the web can be trivially download and executed on the Windows desktop as "full" games. That's a nice time saver.
What's really limiting Silverlight right now is its limited control set. Right now SL is a blank canvas with only a few default controls. The rest of the stuff you have to right yourself. The good news is that SL 2.0 will solve that problem (as well as tons of 3rd party control vendors).
SL 2.0 also ships with a limited version of the .NET framework... which means you can write complex, compiled C#/VB/C++/JavaScript/Python/Ruby code that drives the SL front-end... all running in the browser, or at the server... you're choice. That's going to be killer... the Visual Studio and Expression development tools are already top-notch and continue to improve.
So I think that MS is actually moving in the right direction. I don't think they are hampered technologically... the question is can they recruit the hearts and minds of dedicated Flash developers. It's a war of people and attitudes (as evidenced by the anti-MS attitudes I see I already see in this thread), not necessary one of technology. He who wins the developers win.
