Question

I am having doubts on this. Is an EXE or AIR better for flash based desktop game ? I opine for an AIR solution, as it seems safer and platform independent ( Win and MAC both) . But when i search google, games are generally in EXE format. I would like to get experts opinion on this please.

Answer 1

AIR and EXE aren’t mutually exclusive.

Using AIR over Flash gives you access to additional API’s that Flash does not have. You can create EXEs with AIR captive runtime.

Choosing whether to deploy your game as an EXE file or AIR file depends on your situation. The main advantage of distributing it as an AIR file is that it will result in a smaller file size as the AIR runtime will be separate. However, I generally prefer EXE over AIR even though it will result in a larger file, since it is easier to tell users to install a familiar EXE rather than an AIR file that will then download some third party runtime.

If you have decided to deploy as EXE, you have two choices – Flash projector or AIR captive runtime. As mentioned above, AIR gives you access to additional API’s, so in general that will be the better choice. Additionally, AIR gives you the ability to deploy to multiple platforms including Mac OS X, iOS, Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. To my knowledge you can only create Flash projectors for Windows and Mac.

One situation in which Flash projector may be a better choice is if you wish to deploy your game both as a Flash web game and a desktop game. In this case, using a Flash projector assures API parity between the two, while using AIR can result in using desktop-only API’s which you will then have to remove from the Flash version.