I am curious as to whether there will be a need for Scaleform (in it’s current form) in the future considering that now Flash has both the Stage3D and native support for the Unreal Engine (I mean, at least towards Unreal Engine games).
I’m asking this mostly out of curiosity, and because I wasn’t able to find too much information about how UE works with Flash. Also, I have not worked with Scaleform, only read up on it, (Scaleform workflow), and they don’t mention stage3d anywhere.
I’m not sure if this is the best place to ask about Scaleform (there seems to be no Scaleform tag), but it seems to me that there should be some sort of bridge now between them and stage3d.
What do you guys think?
Stage3D is for rendering 3D games and apps. Scaleform is a 2D UI tool (with extensions to render 2D UI elements in 3D space as well), which the Unreal Engine uses to great effect for their menus and in-game HUDs.
Stage 3D renders Unreal to a browser window, but Unreal uses Scaleform to render its UI. So yes, there is still a need for Scaleform. The Scaleform workflow makes UI development very easy, and Scaleform’s GPU accelerated, multi-threaded core architecture and renderer, along with its custom tools help make it the most widely used UI middleware in the games industry.
Most developers are using it for creating UI on console & PC titles, with mobile games beginning to use Scaleform as an engine (see Globz – TwinSpin – the first commercially released Flash game on iOS, using Scaleform). With the move of engines like Unreal and Unity into a browser window, thanks to Stage3D, Scaleform will no doubt be used to develop UI for browser based 3D titles as well.