Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
started to implement the mobile version of Flash, the results were far
less than stellar. Stuck with the slowest data speed, UMTS or EDGE, Flash
proved to be a huge battery drain on many devices, and often contained
security holes that could be exploited.
It was Apple, though, and Steve Jobs in particular, with his
penchant for killing obsolete features (like the floppy disk, and most
recently the optical drive on Apple's MacBook Air), who summarily
announced in 2010 that the iOS, as it came to be called, would
never support Flash. This was much more than an idle threat—the
iPhone and iOS, combined with the iTunes Store, was a runaway
success and gave iOS a majority in market share of mobile operating
systems. For mobile games it was a death knell, and Adobe conceded
defeat in 2011, killing further development of Flash for browsers on
mobile devices.
Although we have spent some time discussing the impending demise
and replacement of Flash by HTML5 and JavaScript, don't count Flash out
just yet. Remember, Flash can still run as a local application on the major
mobile platforms like iOS and Android. There are also a huge number
of browser-based Flash games still being played on Mac, PC, and Linux
desktops. Facebook, one of the world's biggest social network sites, still
uses Flash for its browser-based games.
Audio for Flash
Let's discuss the workings of Flash from a content-creation perspective.
Audio usage in Flash is both simple and complex. On one level, it's easy
to insert audio and understand its function in the Flash interface. On
another level, it requires the hand of an integrator or a programmer to
discern the best ways to call and integrate sound into a Flash game or
application using ActionScript or JavaScript libraries.
Flash handles several sound formats:
• AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)
• AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format, for Mac only)
• MP3 (Moving Pictures Expert Group—Audio Layer 3)
• AVI (Audio Video Interleave)
• WAV (Waveform Audio format)
• Au (the audio format developed by Sun Microsystems)
NOTE: MIDI is not supported in FLASH
