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.

The screen resolution changing only is desired for AIR of course and has no relation to the web runtime because there it would indeed be a security risk. I think it wouldn’t be too difficult for Adobe to implement that and with the AIR platform Adobe had applications and, well, I guess games in mind too. So that screen res feature is a no brainer.
Your idea with using Pixel Bender shaders or Alchemy might help but is yet again another dirty workaround and therefore sub-optimal. And as programmers we don’t strive for sub-optimal things.

Flash is a crappy platform. I have to use workarounds all the time. Now, for example, I had to struggle with embedding polish bitmap fonts into Flex. The only way to do so is using Flash’s library->new Font, however that method includes all european characters, norwegian, spanish, german, french… EXCEPT polish. And there’s no way, short of decompiling and recompiling the Flash CS4 IDE to force it to embed additional fonts.

However, if a workaround is technically possible, even if it means unzipping, decompiling, parsing, injecting and recompiling an SWF file from AS at runtime, then it’s doable and that isn’t an insurmountable problem. Don’t complain, some people have it worse.

As for changing resolution: I would do it. I don’t know what kind of gamer are you targetting, but if I spend 4+ months on a game, the player won’t exactly work himself to death if he changes the resolution. And even if he doesn’t he’ll just be playing in a small window, get pissed off at it and change it eventually. Then again, why not just render to a 640×480 buffer and then use a Shader, alchemy or some other fast, fancy method to scale the image to screen res? Using a simple algorithm similar to directx’s point filtering wouldn’t be terribly slow. Especially with some C++ code, however it would run pitifully on a Mac – then again, who uses that junk anyway?

@archont @Rick Yes the resource files are not an issue but would be an optimization for AIR development. Creating several smaller pak files is the only way to solve this atm. For web development this is a whole different story but on the desktop I’d prefer a compact format over loose image-, xml and whatnot files.

@archont Issue 2: Oh please! You can’t be serious! How many people do you know who would switch screen resolution manually everytime they start/end playing your game? I would not be one of them! This is unacceptable.
On AS3: I think the language itself is fine, it just needs some missing OOP features. The structure of the language is ok in my book. But I guess you’re talking about the runtime? I don’t have much insight into that so I can’t really make up an opinion about that.

@wonderwhy-er changing screen resolution would have a very high priority for me since I don’t want to create games that run only in a window and only being able to accept the user’s current screen res is a big problem.

On the web player I can understand the full-screen security measures but as I wrote above I don’t see where they would be useful in AIR.

As for other things you mentioned…

Not shore about resource files and your use case but this problem in web can be handled with help of server side scripting. I mean that you can stream file trough script giving offset as a parameter. Will not do for AIR tough as that seems to be where you want to use it. Large files for browser games are a bad idea. Our Internet is not so fast yet.

As for resolution. This is a nice addition but is not of utmost importance. But it can make performance + user experience a lot better with games.

As for buttons not working right in full-screen mode. Well in browser I agree with Adobe here. I don’t want to see Flash used in a way that JavaScript is used sometimes making it impossible to close the page or do anything else… May be if there was some other way to close/stop Flash like Flash player task manager that shows all ruining SWF files and allows to stop them or change their priority or even ban them. Well that just idea…

I blogged about a few items just the other day (Adobe press releases) that are interesting on the 3D front.
http://www.quilix.com/node/57

Following PushButton is a definite todo!
http://pushbuttonengine.com/

Issue number two:

var txtMsg:TextField = new TextField();
sprInstructionsPanel.addChild(txtMsg);
txtMsg.text = “To enjoy the game to it’s fullest, please change your screen resolution to 640×480. You can do this by minimizing this game, right-clicking on your wallpaper and choosing properties.”

Was it *really* that hard?

Issue number one:

Unsolvable. I have no idea what kind of convulted mess AS3 is, but if Adobe wants Flash to be of any use, they need to rewrite the legacy 1997 remains of AS1, replace the //TODO: Add real font support here with real font support and start using interfaces.