Hello,

I am new to both away3d and flash and want to know few facts about away3D before I start learning it.

1. Can I create games 3d/2d using away3d and Flash on Windows7 x64 that will run or work on iOS and Android without modification ?

2. Will the game work on any device / OS platform that supports Flash ?

Thanks,

Hi,

1. To build for mobile devices you need to use AIR, which is essentially Flash with some extra configuration and if you want to, some extra API capabilities. You do not need to make any platform-specific modifications to your code, so the exact same code base can be published to both iOS and Android.

2. If you use AIR it will run as an application on all platforms that AIR supports, which is mostly everything. If you use Flash it will run on all platforms that have a recent enough Flash Player installed (11.0 to be specific), and that does of course not include iOS which doesn’t support in-browser Flash, and also not Android which does not support the 3D APIs that Away3D use.

Bottom line, if you use Flash (for browser) you can target both Windows and OS X. If you use AIR (to create applications) you can target Windows, OS X, iOS and Android.

I’m not sure about Linux support these days, but I don’t think that the 3D APIs are supported on Linux.

Hello Sir,

Thank you for taking time to read my post and explaining everything.

I have another question regarding the learning curve - Adobe AIR or Flex or are they the same ?

The entire naming scheme here is a bit of a circus. Flex is a framework, and an SDK. You do not need the framework (it’s more or less useless for game development) but the SDK is what is used to compile SWF files. AIR is a platform, but to be able to build things for AIR you need the AIR SDK, which is part of the Flex SDK.

If you use an IDE to build your apps, you usually do not have to know all the intricate differences between these things. Just remember that you do not want to create a Flex app, you want to create a pure AS3 app that uses the AIR runtime/platform (not the normal Flash runtime.)

Sir, thank you for making everything lucid. Now I can proceed with learning Away3D.