The project page indicates that it's pre-alpha code, and suggests the actionscript support is weak. Flash UIs are nice, so I was wondering if anyone has experience getting gameswf to the point where it will embed nicely in C++ (e.g. nice function bindings) and properly play a swf that uses typical modern actionscript.
Is there an alternative that doesn't carry the pricetag of a commercial product?
I'm not personally familiar with gameswf, so I can't comment on how capable it is, however if your target platform is Windows only (for now), I can point you towards Hikari.
It was originally built for Ogre3D but it should be fairly straightforward to port, and it's been used in commercial titles such as Zero Gear.
Best of all, it will play everything you can play with the most recent Flash player (just replace the ocx that comes with the SDK with a more recent version).
In the future, Hikari will simply become an Ogre3D wrapper for the cross-platform Akarui.
Having had personal experience of GameSWF (the version made by tulrich) I can tell you that it only supports as1.
It isn't especially complicated to utilise and could be said to be better in terms of direct functionality than some other commercial solutions that can cost thousands of dollars.
If you can do what you need your menus to do using as1 then it's not a bad choice.
I'v tried to use GameSWF in one of my projects. As far as the rendering goes, it seems solid. The problem appears in the action script part. Some simple scripts work, but more complex ones fails. The main problems are in the actions script virtual machine implementation, its not working exactly as the one in Flash. It has some problems with garbage collection too. (or has back then when I was trying to use it)
From my personal experience: if you need it for just few buttons with no more than very basic action script and non fancy graphics, it may be ok. But for more advanced UI in a commercial projects, there are better solutions like ScaleForm or Iggy. But ofc they are not for free.
