LiveCode Forums.

I've been using RealBasic for years and I really like it, but found Livecode and decided to give it a try. I don't like the UI very much but it's bearable and I really don't want to spend time learning the new syntax (although it looks very easy) if I won't use the language. I DO like some of the graphical effects in Livecode compared to RB, it seems like every control can be transparent/alpha-blended etc - something which seems to be missing in RB. And the few tutorials I've run through are impressive - it looks very easy and fast to use and the results look great. So I'm definitely intrigued... a couple of questions...

I mainly make games, mostly just for fun but I also run an email-game for a living. For a very long time I've been considering using RB to convert my game into a web-browser game but right now it doesn't seem suitable for various reasons. Would Livecode be capable of making a full web-browser game, along the lines of Evony/Travian etc? The web examples I've looked through seem to just deal with general web stuff so I'm not sure if it has all the graphical capabilities required.

For basic games, all the examples I've seen seem to be fairly 'applicationy' for want of a better word. The graphics all seem to be various controls rather than sprites and so on. It's not a big deal-breaker for me as I just play around with making games for fun, but is Livecode capable of basic sprites with rotations and so on? I see there's a rotation command and I hear the graphics are fairly fast, but I've yet to see a really gamey sample.

Overall it does look nice and fun to use so I'm pretty tempted to get more involved just as a hobby. But then again as I said, I'm a bit lazy when it comes to learning all the new commands so I'd be more interested if I knew it might be capable of the stuff I'm after.

Can't help with the web game idea, but take a look at a game by RunRev
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/galactic ... 71906?mt=8

Yeah that looks very nice and answers the question that it's well capable of making 2d games. I don't have an iphone or anything so can't test it, but it looks decent enough.

I meant to also ask, is it possible to write games which will run directly in a browser? Not web-games as I mentioned before, but arcade-style games? These usually need Flash, is it compatible with Flash? How about html5?

Someone else will have to jump in to help you with those questions. I've only worked with desktop and iOS apps.

There is a plugin that can be used to display stacks in a browser but there are compatability issues, even if you can get your customers to install the thing in the first place. It hasn't been updated in a while and I wouldn't be waiting expectantly for an update.

As for html5 LC won't output directly to html5 (don't know what plans are in the future for that)

There is LC server which works very well and is super fast but its just a scripting engine ala' php. You could of course have a web back end to do game processing and then build clients for iphone/android/mac/windows and, depending on what you needed it to do, linux (feature parity is not complete on the linux side) using livecode. Then of course there would still be the option of building a web front end to the game also.

Unfortunately for plugin based browser games, flash is king.