[web] Advice Req: Fully Flashy, or hybrid PHP?

I don't think actionscript can communicate directly with a server. Assuming I'm correct, you would be stuck with using some sort of hybrid system either way.

I understand that Actionscript does not directly interface with the server-side things....I was mostly wondering if the user GUI should be all Flash, so that everything is fully animated and 'pretty', or if it is a bad idea to take the game as it currently exists (try it out!), and make sub-sections of it use Flash and save/load the results of those sub-sections back to the database.

Example: exploring would function as it currently does with simple PHP and HTML output to the screen, but if you get attacked, the page loads a little imbedded Flash file (which in turn loads the appropriate player/monster data into itself, and saves the data back when it exits) to handle the combat, then dumps the player back to the "regular" game-mode as it currently works.

I think your users, especially your power users, will appreciate a responsive, light-weight interface more than a "pretty, flashy" one. There is a lot to be said for minimalism in UI. Your goal is to draw players in, keep them playing, and compell them to return, and the first step to that is to create a UI that does not repulse people. Simple HTML can be made to look very good, you don't need Flash to make an attractive page.

I don't usually play these types of web-based games, but my sister does. She's pretty heavily in to Neopets and Kingdom of Loathing. I see her playing a lot more KoL lately, and she often remarks on how much faster playing KoL is compared to Neopets. Neopets does a lot of things with Flash, whereas KoL is straight-up HTML (I think it's ran on Perl).

Having a quick look at your's, I think it would benefit more from good, old-fashioned, graphic design than it would from Flash.

Here's a screen-cap of something that resulted from some screwing around with a full ASP.NET / SQL Server solution to a web-based game. It's extremely early in development, but the most important part of it is the emphasis on simplicity in the UI. The most important commands are listed in plain view. The attractiveness of the page is acheived through use of color and imagery, not through animation or music. I'm considering supporting user created content, so that's what the "Connect a room here" link is all about. Instead of supporting a strictly grid-like world, I decided to create a graph world, as it provides for more interesting mapping abilities.

Flash supports both traditional web services and a proprietary format called AMF (action message format) which may be used through an API called "Flash remoting". Flash remoting uses TCP/IP, a binary message format and AFAIK it can even be connection oriented/stateful. Of course you'll still need a web server and some PHP (AMFPHP [http://www.amfphp.org/] comes to mind).
That said, you can also use &#106avascript to creaty relatively flashy interfaces.<br><br>Since people often play browser games at work though, i don't think "flashy" is what you want.<br>

Thanks for the comments you two!
I think I'll keep the current functionality and try to clean up the interface slightly. The whole exercise was undertaken to -teach- myself HTML and PHP, so I admit it's a bit less than professional at the moment. I've learned a good deal in the process, hence the re-write.

And as for "flashy", I think it would read more accurately to have written "flash-y" (made in Flash, but still graphically simplistic).

Quote:

Original post by capn_midnight I don't think actionscript can communicate directly with a server. Assuming I'm correct, you would be stuck with using some sort of hybrid system either way.

There is Flash Media Server, which you can call in Actionscript 1.0 Have read a little on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Media_Server