I know some gaming companies do this but I do not know where to start. How do you make something in Flash and use C++, or whatever you make the game with, to read that Flash file? How do you incorporate this in the first place?

I'm not sure if the question is so easy to answer no one bothers, or it's hard and no one knows about it.. hehe

But this will save lots of time on the GUI creation part and even if I'm far from that, I want to plan ahead.

THanks,

Hi,

We use flash in the current game project I'm working on.

To start off with let me say that you should not underestimate the work involved in getting flash integrated into a game; it's a Big job.

Secondly there are licensing issues that make the situation more complex. The latest version of Flash (7) is not a completely open file format. You can download the format documentation, but in doing so you must agree to a license that restricts what you can do with the information. Specifically you can Only use it to Create SWF files. Creating a custom Flash renderer for a game is not permitted by Macromedia without purchasing a license from them or using their own SDK (which costs money).

One way around this is to use an older version of Flash, like version 4, which was a completely open format, with the details freely available. This is what we do, but it means that you are restricted to the limited ActionScript abilities of Flash 4; ie. no classes or functions; just simple basic scripting and goto frame commands. It's for this reason that we don't use Flash to create the entire UI. Instead we have a UI system written in C++ that is able to play spot Flash animations and transitions, and extract object placements from layout template files.

As a starting point you may like to have a look at this link...

http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html

...which is an opensource flash renderer for Flash 4 SWF files, using OpenGL to render with. It illustrates quite well the basics of what's needed to render flash files, and how to convert the Flash Shapes into polygons that can be rendered by a 3D graphics card.

Thank you :) I had checked that site before posting here, and I was under the impression that he made it just to play Flash stuff.

I get your point... it might be smarter in this case then to just use animated gifs but build the UI still with C++.

Thanks a lot. This saved me a lot of time :)

One more thing.. if I do decide to use SWFs, how in the world am I going to get an old copy of Flash? :D hehe

As far as I know Macromedia doesn't sell that.

You can use the latest version of Flash MX as it has an option to set the Flash version when you are exporting a SWF file.

So you can just set it to Flash 4 when saving; but you need to be careful that you only use features that are supported by that version.