Author Topic: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project  (Read 10225 times)

Robbie Ogrenix

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Hello,

I am looking for a coder who is intimately familiar with Flash to give me a few opinions on a roguelike codebase I am working with.  If anyone here would be willing to lend me a moment of their time I would be extremely grateful.

Primarily, I am concerned with the possibility of migrating the code to another language.  I am afraid that the heavy use of Flash-specific functionality may make it a difficult prospect.  However, I would welcome a more veteran coder's opinion on the matter, should one be offered.

Anyone interested will be privately linked to the repository and I will make any concessions necessary in order for such an individual to give their full insight.

Thanks, ToTR!

chooseusername

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #1 on: November 03, 2014, 08:09:25 PM »
Primarily, I am concerned with the possibility of migrating the code to another language.  I am afraid that the heavy use of Flash-specific functionality may make it a difficult prospect.  However, I would welcome a more veteran coder's opinion on the matter, should one be offered.
Why not list the features you think will be problematic, and the language you intend to go to?  Seems like you're making it harder than it needs to be.

Robbie Ogrenix

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #2 on: November 03, 2014, 11:51:54 PM »
@Bishop:

Unfortunately, I'm not really a programmer and I don't know anything about the code aside from what the previous programmer has told me.  As far as the language that I intend to go to, that is really an area where I could use some input as well.  I was considering C++ with Unity, based on several factors.  However, as I've said, I'm not a programmer.  Because of that I am wholeheartedly open to opinions and input.

As in the OP, I would be happy to link anyone willing to grant me a few minutes (or anyone curious) links to the IP's hosted site as well as the repository.  Thanks again!

Trystan

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2014, 06:33:45 AM »
Migrating from any language to any other language is going to be tedious, tougher than you expect, much more expensive than you want to hear, and almost certainly not worth it if you already have a working codebase. Unless you're migrating to something that is a strict superset like C to Objective-C or Javascript to Typescript.

I was considering C++ with Unity

I don't think that's a thing. At least not a supported thing. Unity supports C# and its own javascript-like language. There may be C++ bindings I'm not aware of though.



Anyway, my suggestion, from a programmer to who I'm guessing is a product owner, is that if you currently have something beyond a prototype, then any large change from one language to another or one major framework to another (Flash to C++, GameMaker to Unity, etc) is going to be really really costly. And probably unnecessary.

Spelunky was written in GameMaker, became popular and profitable, and was then rewritten in Microsoft's XNA game framework to reach a wider market. Maybe you could aim for something like that?

Robbie Ogrenix

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #4 on: November 04, 2014, 12:39:05 PM »
@Trystan:

Thanks for the reply!  Sadly, there are some planning decisions that competent partners prefer you already have a firm decision on upon their arrival to a project, which can result in someone who is woefully unqualified to make such decisions being forced to do so.  This, clearly, is one of those cases.

I'll have to look into these alternatives.  Thanks again for your input!

Rickton

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #5 on: November 04, 2014, 03:06:05 PM »
I'm not a Flash (or Haxe) coder, but you might want to look into OpenFL. It's an implementation of the Flash API for the Haxe programming language, which can target pretty much any platform. I'm not sure how easy it is to convert a project, but it might be worth looking into.
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koiwai

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #6 on: November 04, 2014, 10:03:38 PM »
Flash is not the most popular platform for programming roguelikes, so you should probably ask at Flash development forums/communities. And I second Rickton's suggestion to look at Haxe and OpenFL.

Bells

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Re: Looking for a seasoned Flash coder to give an opinion on roguelike project
« Reply #7 on: November 10, 2014, 03:13:05 PM »
This would depend on what language you may wish to port it to afterwards. For example, if you wanted eventually to port the game to C++, then you'd probably be better off starting off in C++ and cross compiling it with something like Crossbrigde (http://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/). Or if you wanted eventually to port the game to .NET for example, you might want to consider looking into Silverlight and XNA etc.

Actually porting the game from one language to another is an incredibly difficult and tedious task and trust me I've done it! There are always niggly bugs which haunt you and in essence what you end up doing is rewriting the entire game from scratch, porting the game one function at a time (at least in my experience and assuming the languages are radically different).

Having said all that though, I take it you are working with an existing codebase which has been programmed in flash/actionscript (with the flash API) and are wanting to use the codebase in a language you are more familiar with, let's say C++ for example.

Porting over the APIs can be difficult since there is no guarantee of there being an equivalent API function in your target language, my approach has always been to simply build these APIs as functions in the main program and have the function call an equivalent API/s and reformat the output so as you don't need to mess too much with the structure of the function that called it. That saves a lot of time but can also be hard work and would be considered rather inelegant by some people's standards.

I'm sure someone more experienced may have a better solution, but ultimately it will depend on what your level of programming knowledge is (in both the source and target language), how much time you have to port the code, the differences between the languages etc. This is all of course, assuming you are targeting the same platform, if you're porting cross platform or wanting to write cross-platform code then you need to take into account these differences, especially if you are porting a high level relatively platform neutral language like flash into something low level such as C.

As Rickton says, Haxe is a good choice (cross platform), has a syntax which should feel familiar to flash coders and with the OpenFL library you may find it much easier to port those actionscript APIs without too much of a headache.