So, I guess blame non-epic companies for not wanting to make their own HUD systems for their engines and thus turning scaleform into a standard of sorts that Epic then adopted?
What's the downside of Scaleform though? I'm using it now, and it seems like a decent way to do things. I guess they could have come up with some system of their own that would have basically done the same thing. But then the Flash standard already exists. So why not just use it?
Similarly, I never understood why UT3 had to have Flash-based Scaleform for its simple menu interfaces. Even a Team Arena-like script system would've been good enough for that. (and TA's menus are horribly unintuitive to produce from scratch, but at least it's not Flash) How did that come about? Adobe throwing money at…
UDK DID have its own script system for menus in the canvas classes and a tool called UIscene, iirc. General consensus was that it was limited in what it could do and was clunky to use..though most indies liked it well enough. Triple A devs couldn't get the results they wanted, I guess, and many veteran UI developers were…