The future of the net

[Humodour]

I have 4gb of ram and I've never gone above 2.5 gig in usage at any one time, and that's with both a game and an entire operating system running at once. And often a bunch of tabs in Chrome in the background (which is half a gig to a gig).

 

Edit: Still, it does seem a bit ludicrous to use something like Flash/ActionScript in place of something more standard and designed for the task (any common game scripting language). But, you know, whatever works for the game (and it clearly did work fine judging by Moose's post).

Edited May 6, 2010 by Krezack

[Nightshape]

Well no it's not irelevant because if as you say memory management does not matter on a PC (he says trying to keep a straight face), then the 10meg footprint you're talking of is worse case scenario and they would have engineered a lighter version for the console. Indeed PCs have greater overheads due to OS requirements - for example Adobe released a lite version of flash for mobiles. It's in their interest to continue developing in this direction due to the surge of tablet computers.

 

Then there's the benifit of cutting development costs if you can employ someone that merely knows actionscript to do the GUI this is obviously going to be considerably cheaper than employing a C++ developer.

 

As I've said, the new Crytek engine, which runs on console, uses Flash. It runs without problem - so I hear your argument but I'm merely pointing you toward the real world.

 

Seriously dude, I just took 15 minutes to have a conversation with our GUI coders on this specific issue. With a collective experience of 20 years I think I'm going to value their opinion over your own - which doesn't appear to be an experienced perspective at all.

 

When I'm speaking about managing memory on PC I'm talking about a different scenario, it's a simple fact that you have more resources to play with in regards to the PC, so a 10 meg footprint isn't going to hurt you in the same way that it would on a console. Its true that games have shipped with flash GUI's, on consoles and actually taken that 10 meg system hit + asset resources. That is project dependent, but just because someone has done it doesn't make it wise.

 

I'm not anti-flash in any way shape or form, it just doesn't strike me as a sensible solution. I'm not even touching on the performance implications of using flash for GUI's.

 

I don't think that there is any benefit to development costs, the best person for the art isn't likely to be a flash expert at all, unless you're willing to accept some mediocre bulls***. You've likely increased the size of your development team, unless you get lucky.

 

Just because the CryEngine 2 does it, doesn't make it good, that's their solution and part of their approach which is fine.

 

This idea that Crytek can't make dumb decision is funny, no developer is perfect. You know you can point to an example of something working in practice, but that doesn't mean its the best solution... And at the end of the day you may be pointing at the real world, that's fine you've found an example. How many developers don't use flash? I can assure you the best GUI's in the world are not flash based.

[Nightshape]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the problem is either, other than "games traditionally just don't use more memory than this even though they could so there's no reason to change it". Might not be what Nightshape means, but it's pretty much what I'm getting from it.

 

My point is on a console its a waste of memory.

[Moose]

Obviously any GUI coder you know is going to be against it. It's going to put them out of a job

[Nightshape]

Obviously any GUI coder you know is going to be against it. It's going to put them out of a job

 

*sigh* You honestly think that. So who deals with the flash implementation within the engine...?

 

If you're wanting to provide an out of the box solution, flash is a cheaper way of doing that, the unreal approach is an expensive way.

 

Your own system is likely to be faster, have better memory usage, easier to maintain, unbloated etc...

 

It always depends upon the project itself.