UI Customization and Capital Ships In Jumpgate Evolution 41
ZAM got a chance to speak with NetDevil's Scott Brown at the recent LOGIN 2009 conference about various aspects of upcoming space MMO Jumpgate Evolution. He mentioned that massive ships will be limited in scope and role to begin with, but may expand and evolve as they figure out what users like. He also made some interesting comments about UI customization:
"We built it with the goal of letting people mod the UI. There's still a little bit more work to do that, so I don't know if it'll be ready at launch, but all of our UI is built in Flash. This is with the idea that anybody can build something with Flash and put it in the game. Now, there are problems, for example, if you do certain things in Flash that might cause the game to perform really slowly. We've still got to figure out how to educate people or how we verify this so that you don't make a mod that I download and my game experience is destroyed. We want it to be easier than that. I think that there will be some work to do, but the goal is that, eventually, people will be able to, using Flash, make their own UI."
Not Flash! ARGGGHHH (Score:5, Interesting)
To be honest, my interest in this game just dropped by 30% upon hearing it uses Flash.
Flash for me is slow, buggy and proprietary. I would much prefer something like WoW where UI addons can be scripted in Lua.
I applaud the idea of making the UI totally customizable, really thats a great thing. But I really don't like that it uses Flash.
I guess only the beta will tell if it sucks or not...
Re:Not Flash! ARGGGHHH (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not Flash! ARGGGHHH (Score:1, Interesting)
how is this 5, interesting?
this is pure flame bait, and that's what its gonna get because the author is terribly informed.
First of all, flash is no slower than javascript, which is your only real alternative in a browser( silverlight/java have very low market penetration by comparison). On some tasks, such as image manipulation, it is much faster.
As for being buggy, this is really a problem for flash developers, not for the technology itself. The flash libraries themselves are extremely polished and well documented. Check them out if you wish. Bad programmers will make mistakes in any language. There are plenty of badly made javascript sites out there.
As for being proprietary...Most of the swf standard is in fact open. The flex SDK is open source. The flash compiler is free to download and use and there are open source IDEs available. Also, what's the alternative? Years of open standards in the web space have brought us ie 6 and a half dozen other interpretations of the standards. Years of proprietary flash development has resulted in a package that renders the same no matter where you do it, and can do many things the open standard cannot. I'm not generally a supporter of proprietary software, but for this the case could be made.
Furthermore, the flash that is used in games is not made by adobe, its made by ScaleForm. This version of flash is heavily optimized to be run in games. The api is more limited and a lot of processing is offloaded to the gpu. It's a complete apples to oranges comparison to the flash you find in your browser.
The only reason flash gets a bad reputation is that it can do with ease what html/css cannot, and that's rich media. Thus it is the tool of choice for people who do annoying things (ie advertisers). Its not the fault of flash that these things end up poorly coded and annoying. What are you going to blame when standards like html5 are actually common, and people start using that to annoy you instead?