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DS development > NDS Development Flash Extension

#52946 - cybereality - Sun Sep 04, 2005 10:26 pm

I had an idea of how to use Macromedia Flash as a NintendoDS devlopment frontend. Basically it would be a Flash extension which would export the flash movie into a NDS file. This means you can design the game on the PC and also test on the PC without needing the actual hardware. When your finished testing you can export to NDS/GBA and load onto a flash cart. I think this would save a lot of time, and may open up the community to actionscript coders.

I got the idea from the workflow on a game I'm working on. I needed to populate a large array for collision detection. I started to map out the points manually in photoshop, but this became tedious. So I loaded the background into flash and wrote a quick script that would print out the X/Y values of these collision boxes I set up. It saved me a shitload of time. Plus when I had to tweak some of the boxes, it was no problem. If there were some kind of exporter or flash extension that would do this automagically, it would be awesome. It would need to have some sort of actionscript -> c++ converter. It could then connect on the backend to the compiler and ndstool or whatever to create the NDS file.

Not only would this be a great rapid prototyping tool, but it would open the floodgates to DS ports of existing flash content. There are many amatuer flash game developers that couldn't be fucked to learn c++, but would jump at the oppurtunity to make a DS game in flash. I have a good feeling about this.

Any other flash developers here want to see this happen?

// cybereality

#52947 - tepples - Sun Sep 04, 2005 10:31 pm

Macromedia doesn't, at least not without paying a lot of money. Recent versions of the gratis version of the SWF spec are write-only; people who have read them are bound by trade secret law not to make a .swf player.

Besides, a lot of us on gbadev.org can't afford Flash, which costs roughly 6 times as much as flash.
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#52949 - Dannon - Sun Sep 04, 2005 10:35 pm

This would open the system up to a lot more developers which can't be a bad thing for a system, the more people working on it the more people have it, I don't know how easy it would be to do, I only know a small amount of Flash, someone must know more on this subject.

I also see a downside with a lot of crap flooding in if this actually did happen

edit: I never thought about the Macromedia side of it, very good point tepples, I can't imagine they would be overjoyed

#52955 - cybereality - Sun Sep 04, 2005 11:58 pm

tepples, my suggestion has nothing to do with the SWF format at all. The extension would compile the program to a proprietary format instead of SWF. The only thing taken from flash would be the actionscript, but I'm sure that would be legal. It would basically be piggybacking off of flash and leveraging the tools we are already using. Flash would merely be a front end, all the backend would be from freeware/open-source tools so that doesn't violate any copyright laws.

// cybereality

#52959 - doublec - Mon Sep 05, 2005 1:04 am

Some people in Macromedia are interested in getting Flash running on the DS apparently. I got an email from someone there a while back requesting information on whether a flash port would be of interest and looking at throwing a demo together.

This may not have been a 'official' enquiry into flash on the DS but at least shows interest from inside the company.

#53251 - CubeGuy - Wed Sep 07, 2005 2:01 am

I've been toying with the idea for a long time. It'd make it much easier for a lot of people.

And think of it this way: There are many many comunities that program flash games. Many more script flash movies. The amount of crap would be increased, yes, but the amount of amazing games and apps would increase just as much.

#53269 - kerrle - Wed Sep 07, 2005 3:50 am

Maybe of some help:

http://www.mtasc.org/

Also, there's:

http://gplflash.sourceforge.net/

The original GPLFlash is badly out of date, but they are working on a new version.

#53286 - cybereality - Wed Sep 07, 2005 7:57 am

Thanks a bunch for the links. That motion-twin action-script compiler sounds like it will be a lot of help. I will probably want to write the extension from scratch, but that should be a good start.

// cybereality