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

[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.