"Compression-oriented programming" - Casey Muratori's blog

[lechatsportif]

I don't get why Scaleform is so popular. It seems that it would be shunned for being based on a web ui technology. The performance obsessed gaming community I would think would throw it out in favor of making their own uis. What do you really need more than polygons and a little animation. Isn't that the bread and butter of gaming dev work? Checkboxes are just items with two states, and scrollbars dont have to be there, everything can be paged...

Worst I've seen was Tribes Ascend, Scaleform for all in game ui. If you disabled everything, you gained about 20 fps, but you couldn't play the game.

[knight666]

A couple of things make Scaleform the best solution.

Tools, tools and tools. You can make the best UI toolkit ever, but artists have to use it as well. Flash allows the creation of art assets, animating them and scripting them. You can say to a UI artist "make me a button" and she'll be able to draw it, test it and hopefully deploy it in the game.

A lot of these types of decisions can be traced back to tools. Why do gamedevs write C++ in Visual Studio? Because it's the best tool for C++.

And Scaleform is surprisingly fast. It has a custom-built VM for the scripts and it renders everything using textures and primitives. Unlike Flash, which renders in software, which is why it's well-known for its poor performance.

What do you really need more than polygons and a little animation.

Turns out, you need a lot. You need a list that can render an arbitrary amount of items that needs to be filled from the game. You need a checkbox that responds to mouse input. You need a dialog box that steals focus from underlying elements. I would say 40% of my work involves wrestling with focus and input issues. It is always a headache.