Thoughts on Flash for UI addons

[Teakwood]

According to the recent interviews with Yoshi-P, they're thinking of using Flash for community-built UI addons.

As someone who'd probably wind up getting into building addons if they were in something like Lua or Ruby, I'm slightly frownyface at the idea of using Flash, but I'm willing to consider that's out of ignorance on my part - I've never deeply worked with Flash before, so I am possibly making a snap aesthetic judgement. I am aware of several problems with its use, but...

Is there anyone more knowledgeable about UI scripting who could chime in here? Alternately, potential UI addon creators, what languages are you most comfortable with and would prefer to use?

[Molly_Millions]

I hope they don't use flash, because I suck at it. Given I would probably only tweak someone else's code to my liking, I wouldn't be very effective at that with flash.

[Teakwood]

Haha, yeah, that's secretly why I'm posting, I think Flash is ugly and I don't really want to have to learn it, whereas I've been looking for a reason to get proficient with Lua and I know some other languages pretty well

[Kafeen]

Flash is very good at UI scripting. Look up Scaleform for what a flash based UI can do and what games have used it already.

There's even an MMO toolkit that gives a lot of the features they want. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...v=6t4skDLLf_E#!)

[Teakwood]

Thanks for the link! I'll do some research. (I wouldn't mind learning Flash if there actually -are- excellent UI scripting tools for it already. Considering that community-made UIs is a pet project of Yoshida's and something it sounds like he had to sell to the JP community, I'm pretty confident he'll make a good choice as to its implementation.)

[Esk]

Na Screw the mmo kit if we go Flash, has to be along the lines of the 3Di one, now that really could make a nasty little FF feeling UI for XIV2.o

[Aistaraina]

Flash is very good at UI scripting. Look up Scaleform for what a flash based UI can do and what games have used it already.

There's even an MMO toolkit that gives a lot of the features they want. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...v=6t4skDLLf_E#!)

Scaleform also comes with a $10,000 price tag, and is developed by one of the leading companies in art and animation tools. You can't even get an evaluation copy unless you work for a well known studio. So throw that one out the window.

As for myself, I do a lot of UI work in C++, so i'd rather SE give us a small API to the engine and let us inject that in.

[Jigg]

I would prefer something more open source that doesn't involve buying editors. Either custom scripting or use of existing scripting languages. Though, hopefully whatever the decide on, they will let us know well in advance of 2.0's release.

[Kafeen]

Scaleform also comes with a $10,000 price tag, and is developed by one of the leading companies in art and animation tools. You can't even get an evaluation copy unless you work for a well known studio. So throw that one out the window.

It comes with UDK.