How To Port Flash Games For The Wiz


pea

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Hi all,

I just got a PM from OrangePumpkin and thought that others may be interested in this same thing too, so I'll post it in the forums:

QUOTE
How do You port the flash game , do they need to be changed ( controls , resolution ?? ) ??

( Earlier thought that You must just download the game and put it on the Wiz but when You mentioned porting I wasn't so shure any more )

thanks in advance


Normally, you would think that you could grab a Flash game and whack it on the SD card and it should run fine. Although this can be the case, most games will probably need some tweaks. Perhaps 'porting' is not the best word - 'tweaking' may be better. The factors to look in to are:

1) Screen size and aspect ratio. Although Flash scales very well (as it is vector based), the game may not be the same aspect ratio as the Wiz. This will either result in bars on the sides (or top and bottom), or worse - visible content around the edges of the game that you are not supposed to see. Making the game the same aspect ratio as the Wiz, or better still the same size (320x240), is the way to go.

2) Image size. This is related both to scaling to a smaller screen, and to performance. games made for larger screens will have large images, which are scaled down to be displayed on the Wiz. However, any manipulation on the images is performed on all pixels, even if they aren't visible due to scaling, resulting in a performance drop. If images are resampled so that they are smaller and don't need scaling on the Wiz, this is much better when they are rotated etc.

3) Keyboard. The Wiz doesn't have a keyboard, so you'll either need to add a virtual keyboard to the game, or map the keys you need to the buttons that best make sense. Although you are able to map keys to buttons through the Flash Player on the Wiz (a very handy feature), it is of course better to build this into the game so the player doesn't need to change settings per-game.

4) Mouse. Most games make a lot of use of the mouse. This is emulated by the touch screen, so in most cases there is no problem. However, the touch screen does not emulate mouse-over or mouse-out, which may be required in some games (this is when the cursor hovers over something without the button being pressed).

5) Sound. Although not so much of a problem, this can be an issue with unsupported sound formats. This is most likely when porting from Flash Lite (for mobile phones) which make extensive use of MIDI. The Flash Player on the Wiz (and the PC) does not support MIDI.

6) Performance. This is by far the biggest problem. Because the Wiz does not have the power of a PC (the Flash Player performs more like a mobile phone) there is a lot to consider and strip down here. I (through my company) have a LOT of experience here, and it is an area we excel at - one of the big reasons our games do so well on mobile phones:
- Bitmaps (Images) are less intensive than vectors
- Shapes need to be super optimised (less lines)
- Straight lines are way better than curves
- Physics need to be 'fudged' rather than calculated realistically
- Move as little on the screen at once as possible (full-screen scrolling is probably out)
- Use fills instead of lines (this is a very big improvement in performance!)
- Use alphas as little as possible (massive)
- Use flat fills instead of linear or radial (although performance increase is slight here)
- Use lower quality vector images in faster moving objects (when you can't really see them), and swap them to higher quality when the object is stationary
- Limit the use of filters. try to fake them with images or other tricks

Of course we are hoping that the next Flash Player on Wiz has better performance - the testing I have done so far is based on the old (Flash 7) player.

Hope this is at least interesting to people!
 
Thank You ,, so You just need to change the game to fit Wiz better

By the way it is a really nice writen topic
 
'pea' said:
3) Keyboard. The Wiz doesn't have a keyboard, so you'll either need to add a virtual keyboard to the game, or map the keys you need to the buttons that best make sense. Although you are able to map keys to buttons through the Flash Player on the Wiz (a very handy feature), it is of course better to build this into the game so the player doesn't need to change settings per-game.

Won't they make a key mapping program ( including drivers for external keyboard ) ?? What would be possible with the multitasking and would make it possible to play flash games at 320x240 resolution without porting ,, am I right ??

Edit:Is the Wizs flash the full version or a mobile one ??
 
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