http://www.viget.com/inspire/bi-directional-actionscript-javascript-communication

Few years ago Adobe binged thousands of talented programmers to the platform, with big hope that Flash is worth of the word ‘PLATFORM’. In my opinion if 3D and multi threading issue will not be resolved within next flash player release, flash will back to plug-in status only. And I am wondering… is this what Macromedia was intend to do with flash? Stay as processor hungry environment in other hand friendly to produce programmers from designers and let them go away?? I am getting pised of sometimes when I am reading blogs of Flash Player Enginers when they tryiing to calm us down with a bit sarcasm style when we realised that next cool feature is actualy one big disapointment.

Sad time for me…

@Matthew I welcome it if we see more improvement for game development in the next player version but I can’t imagine that it would be so terribly difficult for a company like Adobe to add hardware 3D to Flash. But if this would be impossible for the web runtime it should at least be supported for AIR where there’s a lot more room for ‘system-depending’ features.

Like I said in another comment I mean the AIR runtime in regards to the escape key. It is clear that this security restriction is valid for the web runtime. But in my opinion Adobe is overreacting there for the AIR runtime. I’d like to be able to remap any key. Imagine a fullscreen game which allows the player to use keys to control all kinds of things in the game (and of course remap keys to your liking). In the heat of the fight, a combat or whatever the player accidentally hits ESC and is catapulted to windowed mode. I don’t know about you but I would find this a herb let-down in any commercial game. Because you as the player would always need to care about not to press the Escape key. It’s a bad design case, quite clearly. Sure it’s not the end of the world but still I’d like to create flawless games. Is that too much to ask for? Security restrictions like this are clearly misplaced in the AIR runtime!

Anyways, all signs lately show that Adobe seem to be getting more serious about game development. A while back Mike Chambers, Ted Patrick and other Adobe employees twittered about a internal full day summit where the various product teams got together to talk specifically about game development. They even made a cool logo that we might see more of, which is a blocky Space Invaders-like character, where the bottom blocks are made up of the Flash, AIR and Flex logos. Since then Adobe launched the “Adobe Arcade” blog focusing on news about game development and Flash. Mike Chambers recently asked on his blog what new API game developers would like to see in the Flash Player. Also on Adobe Arcade, you can see pictures of Mike Chambers building an classic stand-up arcade cabinet to play Flash games on (I imagine this will be on display at MAX).

If you check out Jesse Warden’s blog, you will see an interesting post with many of the links I mentioned above about Flash game development. He’s guessing that this means Flash Player 11 will have a lot of focus on game developers.

However, I’m not sure they will be able to get everything that game developers such as yourself have been asking for. Jim Corbett, who’s on the Flash Player team has mentioned in his Flash Internals v2 talks that he’s given at conferences that Adobe has been working on for some time hardware acceleration in Flash. According to him, Adobe have just been moving very slowly because of what they see as mistakes made with Director’s Shockwave plugin when hardware acceleration and a 3D engine were added in.

Certainly, when it comes to 3D, it seems that Unity3D has a huge edge that I don’t think Flash or Microsoft with Silverlight will ever surpass. As it’s a custom plugin that has it’s sole focus is on 3D compared to Flash or Silverlight where the plugin has other focuses beyond 3D. That said when it comes to Flash, the reach of the plugin will likely always dwarf Unity3D.

As for the escape key, I seriously doubt that will ever happen on the web for security reasons (do a Google search for the keywords: “bunnyhero full screen scaring people” to playful examples of how it could be abused). Not sure if Adobe will make the change for Adobe AIR, but I doubt it as they have generally been paranoid about security (with good reasons with the kind of backlash seen anytime there’s a Flash security flaw). However, personally I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, as other keys can always be used instead of escape.

As a code monkey I’ve long given up noble ideals of making things work the right way. Sure, I use MVC and all that fancy stuff, but all that goes crashing down when I encounter one of the many bugs in Flash. Like, for example, code in your IDE suddenly stops compiling for no reason whatsoever. No compile errors, nothing.

The art is to take a dirty hack, wrap it into a clean and useful library.

Hardware 3D would be a key element for game development if Adobe isn’t switching some gears higher and add that support to Flash they’ll loose that market to other platforms, especially Unity3D. In fact for some people they already lost so if we don’t see 3D support in v11 I guess it could become very difficult for Adobe to catch up on that market.