AS2 or AS3?
Mar 2, 2008 Author: phil | Filed under: DevelopmentWhich is better right now, for Flash game development?
There seems to be an obsession right now with trying to use AS3 for everything largely because it’s the latest thing out there. If you want to be a Flash developer working in an digital agency, then yes you need to know AS3 backwards. But this blog is about independent Flash game development! And it’s a question for developers like me who grew up using AS1, and then AS2. Is it worth the extra time/effort to use AS3? is it going to help me sell more games?
The answer to that question is…..no, but….
There’s a saying in the UK, “horses for courses”, which means use whatever is the best fit. I would say 99% of the Flash games that I see online can easily be done in AS2. Most people who started with Flash 5+ etc, are not hard core programmers, and as such have grown up using AS1, and then AS2. AS3 is quite a big jump from AS2 regardless of whatever people say otherwise. The argument for using AS3 would be a sound one if most of the games online were AS3 and were done in AS3 because they could ONLY be done in AS3, but that’s not the case. As a games designer/developer I don’t want to jump through hoops just to get Flash to do something simple, but with AS3 you do. I’m not saying it doesn’t have it’s good points, of course it does. It is faster for example for some things, but if your main concern is to be spending your time working on the actual game design/gameplay and not getting caught up in the complexities of classes, OOP and the “Display list” then I say use AS2. If you want to do something which is going to have a 100000 mc’s moving around or is 3D, then it’s worth taking the extra time to learn and use AS3, but most Flash games do not need that.
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3 Responses for "AS2 or AS3?"
I read similar article also named r AS3? - Flashgamemaker.com, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me
“…but if your main concern is to be spending your time working on the actual game design/gameplay and not getting caught up in the complexities of classes, OOP and the “Display list” then I say use AS2…”
To me this indicates an incomplete understanding of why game developers would move to AS3. In my eyes the main reason would be it’s more greater completeness in terms of support for OO development. AS3 is far from true OO such that evidenced by C++ and Java, but it’s a darn sight better in the OO sense than AS2 was. Clinging to old technology because it’s what you know is not always a good reason for sticking with that option, particularly when asking yourself “what will I be capable of, when using this newer technology, X months down the line?”.
OO becomes a necessity in larger projects, where the kind of procedural code that is often seen in AS2 rapidly becomes too time-consuming to maintain (as well as being far more difficult for a team of developers to collaborate on). As an aside, game development is, by it’s very nature of using discrete “objects”, “items”, and “entities”, a perfect fit for the OO approach, as any of these can be conceptualised directly as classes.
In terms of display speeds, AS3 is also capable of an speeds an order of magnitude greater than AS2 (easily more than 10x faster using certain methods).
I agree with your statements that AS2 can create by far the majority of browser games you see at the moment. But you will find that as time moves on, the status quo will be raised by what is made possible with AS3 (if only in terms of execution speed and ease of development), and as that occurs AS2 will quickly become undesirable: in fact, this is already happening, if one is only to look at the AS3 developer job market.
Regards,
-Nick
Excuse all the typos…
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