Poor Man’s Flash

Chuck — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:05:31 +0000

John Hattan has written a review of Express Animator on GameDev.net, and Flex SDK / Silverlight developers who do not have access to the corresponding designer’s tools (Flash / Expression Blend) might find his review interesting. Express Animator, as stated in the product name, is a tool that allows you to make animations, and publish them in SWF format for Flash, or XAML format for Silverlight. This basically allows you to make animations for your Flex / Silverlight project for just US$39, instead of paying US$699 for Flash or US$499 for Expression Blend. You won’t be getting all the features of the more expensive products, but you might be surprised to know that Express Animator has features which the other two do not, such as “hierarchical bones”. From the review:

In fact, the combination of Express Animator with the free Flex or MTASC compiler would make for a pretty good “Poor Man’s Flash” product that could be used to make full Flash CS3 quality games, and for quite a bit less than the $699 that you’d spend on a new license of Flash CS3.

Game Programming at scriptedfun » silverlight

Poor Man’s Flash