T2d vs. FlashMX?

#1 Developing games in T2D is pretty quick and efficient :) (lol sorry I'm not giving a more detailed response, I need to hit the sack finally)....

here is a link to a game I made in roughly 2 1/2 hours...

and here is a simple RTS I did in roughly 12-14 hours

#2 FlashMX - General purpose language for developing interactive applications for the web or multimedia.
T2D - Specialized 2D engine for developing games.

If you already know Flash MX, then I'd say to go with that as you have a base of knowledge. But T2D is specifically designed for making games.

Alien Hominid is a special case scenario what almost needed to be made in Flash as New Grounds was a flash animation site, and that was where their viewer/customer/fan base revolved around. It's pure grace was excellent gameplay and amazing graphical style. The PS2 version was completely redone (most likely in C++).

What is your core audience? Do you need to allow them to save their games (Flash is limited in terms of local file management, but database management is fine)? Do you require a web component? Etc.

I'm a huge T2D fan, but it and Flash server two completely different functions. Flash wasn't designed to make games, but that doesn't mean that it can't be utilized in that function. It's just more difficult than making cool web interfaces or streaming video. T2D wasn't made for multimedia projects, but it could be used for one. It's just more difficult than making cool games with it.

#3 When you say "played online", do you mean 'in a browser window' or 'networked'?
You can do the latter, though it's currently mostly usefull for turn-based games or uploading/downloading high-scores(at least untill the full networking layer of TGE is integrated into T2D).

#4 You all forgot one important thing
T2D - $100
FlashMX - $499
FlashMX Pro - $699

also flash can handle simple games while T2D is for more complex games,
as Dasid said flash wasn't created for games while T2D is mainly for games.

#5 I would use T2D for any 2D game you would think about making. It has tools designed for making 2D games built in, including a level editor, particle editor and GUI editor. T2D uses 3D hardware acceleration to render everything, so it runs extremely fast on any modern computer. This means better graphics and smoother gameplay.

#6 You have a t2d con of: longer to develop.

Unless you're already proficient at flash, i believe the opposite would be true. As t2d was built from the ground up to make games, there are many intrinsic shortcuts inside t2d that will save you a LOT of dev time. Flash (at least to me) is very confusing when approaching from a standpoint of making games due to the entire timeline infrastructure. When i spent some time with it, it seemed like i was trying to create a game using a tool that was not built to make games, but a tool designed to create semi-interactive presentations. Now, i admit i haven't touched flashMX, so this may have changed in recent editions.

Also, flash games are driven using actionScript, and t2d games can be driven using torqueScript. I've dabbled in a bit of actionscript, and i'd have to say these 2 languages are very similar in their learning curve. With that being said, T2D stands out as the choice for rapid game development from a beginners perspective.

If you're looking to produce a commercial/shareware title, i think t2d is the way to go. You can take advantage of the advanced 2d effects, which can give your game a more polished look in a shorter period of time than with flash.

The only downside to a torque2d based game vs. flash is that the user would have to download a packaged installer, versus browsing to a webpage and the game starting automatically. Also, I guesstimate you start with a minimum packagesize of 1.5MB (the compiled engine and helper files), plus whatever sourcefiles you add. The caveat here is that flash also has a large base download size, BUT, more than likely, your end user has already downloaded this in advance.

You will be able to do a networked t2d game come official release. As t2d is still in the early adopter phase, that functionality just isn't enabled yet.



As a t2d owner, i'd rewrite the pros/cons as follows:

t2d Pros:
2d game-oriented framework
scripting language for rapid development
particle engine for spectacular graphics effects
tile editor
gui editor
built in physics
Large, helpful online community
cross-platform
Price ($100!)

t2d Cons:
user must download to play
larger download size

Flash Pros:
Huge distribution base (cross platform)
Play game from a web page
Large, helpful online community
Smaller download size (provided user has flash installed....99%+ probably do)
scripting language for rapid general development (however, not tailored toward game development)
GUI development is wonderful

Flash Cons:
Not a game-oriented framework (no gaming specific function calls other than basic collision detection)
Limited in what graphic effects you can acheive in a reasonable timeframe
No built in physics
No build in particle engine
Price ($499)

#7 I think thats a much more accurate Pro and Con list, at least from my experience of working with T2D and Flash, flash is good for what its primary use is, doing fancy things inside a web browser (simple gaming included), in my book its not even in the same league as T2D, T2D is a game engine, an immensely powerful one at that. Flash is not a game engine.

#8 I've got a good idea: Let's ask a dev forum if the dev tool they use is better than their competitors.

Except that I doubt you'll really get an unbiased response... ; )


Flash MX ... is different from T2D. I'd say, use T2D -- not only is it designed specifically for 2D games, it's also cross-platform.

#9 I started as a Lingo (Director) developer first and moved to Actionscript and am migrating towards using tools like T2D and TGE. I've used Flash every single day for almost 5 years and know it pretty much in and out. There are certain things it can do really well and certain things it really blows at. It's a really great animation tool and I continue to be amazed at how quickly a assets from different media can be thrown together in it. Even though it can technically handle large list iteration and collision detection, you'll NEVER get the kind of performance you can get out of a full-blown engine like Torque.
I've made some fun, simpler games with it and Flash 8's new optimized performance engine looks promising, but I would not look to it as a 'real' gaming solution for an action game. Puzzle games, interactive demos, or even slower-paced arcade games like 'Breakout' are relatively easy to throw together and many, many books have been published with pre-written game code for re-skinning. Once you understand Flash's object model, it's easy to kinda go nuts with what is theoretically possible given the flexibility of the ActionScript, but that's unfortunately quite a ways from what is practically possible.
My advice: if you're gonna build a side-scroller, stick with Torque. Besides, one more Flash game developer means I have to work even harder. ;)

#10 Just one more thing Flash has built in Art Creation Tools and T2D does not.

Flashes Vector Art tools are second to none if you know what your doing.

I actually use it to create the art for my T2D Games.

#11 True, though Adobe Illustrator is a very good tool. Flash being at around $600 you can pick up the Adobe Creative Suite for around $1000 and have Photoshop + Illustrator plus more tools and ditch Flash :)

#12 Flash does have very nice vector tools, in many ways superior to Illustrator's (though frustratingly inferior in some ways as well.)

Flash is an awesome platform for a variety of things. Game development is certainly not its focus, but it is a testament to the power of the tool that so many games are made on it.

Obviously T2D has an advantage when it comes to the game making aspect. It is, as mentioned above, a game engine.

The biggest advantage that Flash has from a web game developers standpoint is its huge installed base, and the fact that T2D does not currently run in a browser.

For standalone games, T2D is considerably more powerful than Flash or Director - but again, that is what it is designed to do, so that should not be surprising.

#13 At the company I work for we are thinking about maybe using T2D instead of Flash for some projects. But... T2D being geared towards "classic" 2D games is actually a con for us. Why? Well almost all games/cd-roms we made up till now have animated sequences and/or video. And I'm not only talking about intro movies, but about ingame sequences used for story telling etc (educational games,...).
In flash we can play .flv files for video, and we can have vector animations and even bitmap based animations. In Director we can play .swf's, .flv's (trough flash), .mov's,etc
So the biggest pro for Flash is we can pass these sequence on to an artist, and add them in (no work for the programmers).... where in T2D this is not possible (correct me if i'm wrong).
So, i've been looking into this and I found a resource that makes it possible to play swf files in TGE (should be easy to port to T2D(?)). But.... it seems to be very limited (I'm almost sure it won't support flv playback, also doesn't support sound), and there might be some legal issues. I'm not too concerned about the legal issues as Macromedia's policy towards integeration of the Flash player in software is that they allow it if you place their logo somewhere on the product. And this isnt even their player, but third party software. So, I'll check this out when i have some time, if it works then its likely we'll switch to T2D instead of Director (for some projects). If its not working, then this means we can only use T2D for a very limited number of projects.
So T2D vs Flash MX? Actually a mix of both would be great ;-)

#14 There's also been some work on adding a video playback gui control for the Torque platform. By the looks of it, it's pretty easy to add your own GUIControls to the engine.

#15 I kno this is off topic but I didn't want to just waste up space with one question, ok does the shooter demo scripts come with T2D?

#16 @jason, yes it comes with the source scripts for the spaceshooter and fishdemo demos

#17 You can run (limited) Flash inside of T2D. You can't run T2D inside of Flash.

#18 My situation is perhaps relevant, so I'll jump in with what I know, hoping it helps.

I have been developing games using Flash MX for the past few months and am hitting a performance wall, so I am now pricing/investigating Torque 2D as an alternative.

The first 2-3 games I made were tile based and I developed them in a weekend each, and they work splendidly. Flash has a very short learning curve and is great if you are also an artist, and are comfy with a trial-and-error sort of development.

My latest game is a sort of space game where you have (on he screen) a spaceship with a turret, 1-5 flying enemies, a starfield, a planet, and 1-10 projectiles and bombs and flash is slowing up. This is not a huge load for a 2D game, and I have optimized the "processTick" code and vectors as much as I can (removed alpha, etc.etc.) Even then, I notice I am approaching a performance wall.

So, may advice from that experience to you is that if your game is very, very VERY simple - i.e, the sort of game you don't even consider a "processTick" then I'd go with Flash. It's fun, it's simple, it's quick and as you say: you can download and display it on all manner of shared art sites like Deviant and so on to quick audience approval. If, however, your game is anything above the most simplistic, then I have found Flash simply does NOT have the perfomance to work for you, and let me tell you, in the latter stages of development that can be heartbreaking.

So, a tile-based game, checkers, chess, mancala anything like that - Flash would be fine. Anything "real-time" like a video game, I would say no. I would guess that Flash could maybe handle a Galaxian or a Galaga, maybe even a Xenophobe, but my impression is that would be pushing it.

Also, a friend of mine who is very brilliant was attempting to develop networking to make these games multiplayer, again in a sort of "Real-time" and after months of trying, we abandoned it. So basically anything you could call "real-time" is not going to work with Flash.

Heh, and remember, this is solely a comment on Flash in which i have experience. I have never tried Torque 2D only Torque itself, so I don't know how much harder or longer Torque will be.

#19 @Andrew: wow, that's a great write up. I personally was having demons torment me, whispering in my ear:
" Write a game in Flash... its cross platform... and has 99% penetration...."

After hearing your summary..... yeah.... i think I'm very lucky I picked t2d :)

#20 Andrew: I'm curious - how much vector artwork are you using in your game vs. raster? I ask because I have seen Flash pull off some really amazingly fast gameplay (like the vertical shooters you mention) using almost 100% raster graphics. Even people from Macromedia have repeatedly admitted that while Flash's vector tools are really sharp, the performance of the rendering engine does not approach that of bitmaps. Turning all the artwork, or at least all the complex artwork, into transparent PNGs will increase your game performance by at least double. In most cases, if you convert it cleanly (with a tool like Fireworks), it will look great and be a negligible amount higher in file size.
Also, Flash 8 now has the option of caching vector data as a bitmap. That is, it flattens it in real time and unloads the complex vector data from memory, leaving only a simple bitmap for the engine to render. There are lots of examples of this out there and it gives you the flexibility of keeping a lot of your artwork in vector format for editing, but you gain the speed at run-time.
Just some thoughts.