Flash PLayer 10 on its way to 64-bit

[renderhjs]

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/f...yer10/faq.html

in short:
linux gets it first this time: It gets the first 64 bit version of the flash player so that they dont need wrapper tools to get the plugin running in 64-bit compiled browsers on a real 64 - bit Operation System.
Many Linux users complained about this massivly for many years. The plugin however is not yet completed,- video, microphone and fullscreen features are not yet completed in 64 bit.

There wont be noteable performance boosts for now as the flash player already seems highly optimized as it is today in 32-bit.

Later on OSX will follow and lastly sometime windows XP/Vista/Azure though windows already has downgrade emulation in their 64-bit Operation systems so it wont hurt there.

[dVyper]

For Windows systems I don't see the point of 64-bit compatibility for Flash. For applications which need lots of memory maybe it's useful but I think for Flash there's no significant benefit from it, especially as the number of systems with 64bit processors is limited...

[mr_malee]

can't be a bad thing I guess. Personally I think there's better things they could be investing time in.

[tomsamson]

i totally agree with malee. Sure, cool for linux guys and generally fellas who run 64 bit systems but that is still a tiny minority in the end user content consumer market. Its nice they want to make it future proof but it would be better if before working on that they rather first concentrate on making in current gen proof (focus on integrating things that most people could actually run on their system).
With adding support for multithreading and multicores its a similar thing, still closer to what most people have than 64 bit systems/OS but yeah, i find it annoying they work on such things and still haven´t added propper 3d card support in all those years.
Meanwhile i feel like they´d maybe like to skip the whole propper support for 3d card features side as much as possible due to maybe thinking in a while 3d cards could be gone due to all such things getting done on a multicore cpu, but the problem with such a mindset is that if that ever happens it will still take several years till the market switches over to something like that to a big enough percentage.
On one side they act as if only wanting to add support for what most people have, so the lowest common denominator so no propper 3d card support for so many years but then instead they are putting so much time and ressources into multi core,multi threading and 64 bit system support, things for which it will take way longer till they are adopted by the market to a big degree, bleh, weird strategy.

[renderhjs]

interesting the way you guys interpret the news

my first thought on this was that it was rather a signal towards microsoft and their silverlight, saying something like:
"we have just kicked you again in the ass by supporting linux, prooving to be solid on all platforms and beeing again another 3 steps ahead of you"

the reason for example why Flash Player 10 was delayed is because adobe wanted to beat microsoft regarding video support in FP9. I wouldn't be suprised if this action had similar motivations. Or the free flex SDK versus the open XML format from $ms.

Maybe for your guys (and me perhaps) this might not have much or any impact at all but think for example of linux distributions - now that they have a 64 bit flash player many of them might consider even more including it in their package or in their tools as part of some interface or online site supporting linux customers (government, schools, nerds,..).

News like this gives people more trust in the platform- silverlight for example only supports IE, Firefox and Safari and those only on Mac and WinXp+ (all 32-bit) that's certainly not the whole market esspecially if you think of mobile devices, mini computers, google android, iPhone, consoles and so on.
Only Adobe nearly covers them all ,- for microsoft its rather unlikely at first to even think about that (which can be a good thing at first, to concentrate on quality rather than quantity and then expend perhaps though unlikely imo.).

[tomsamson]

On one side: yes, its good to support as many platforms and OSes as possible of course and yes, that makes it nicer than Silverlight and what not all.
It also surely gives people who run 64 bit systems more trust in the platform and reason and space to use it.
On the other side, to me it gives me less trust in the platform that they add in things that may be well adopted in 2-5 years instead of first and foremost focussing on what the majority of users has and has had for ages.
With flash its always a: hey, sometime in the future it will be awesome then, either hopefully with yet another flash player update or when people have super fast multi core cpus, the more cores the better, hey, sure, also 64 bit systems, why go for something that is widespread today or will be for quite a while.
Meanwhile, as many here know by now i still like flash and use it for what its good at and good for but have no trust anymore in them integrating higher end functionality in a propper way in any reasonable timeframe (i´m bored of waiting yet another 1-2 years at least), so yeah, for higher end stuff i meanwhile use other things than flash, so that shows which effect their policy has on my trust in them doing the right decissions at the right time.

[tomsamson]

to add another note to that: its interesting how silent they are regarding the so hyped 3d card support in flash player 10 now, probably because menawhile its obvious to the majority that their pseudo support brings practically no propper gain in any realistic use case.
Maybe they´d be happy if someone makes some nice performance boost bringing stuff by running some hefty operations in own thread using pixel bender.

[MikeMD]

A useless increase in bitness coming to an irrelevant OS.

Wow! Can't wait.

Just so you don't feel I'm too negative, I confirm that player 10 on IE and firefox 3 finally give us real increase in speed, as in actually can get specified fps without wmode. Took them 10 years, but better than never.

[tomsamson]

would be cool if they at least achieved that, for me its more the case that flash content runs at better performance in firefox 3 while in IE it still runs pretty much the same as with flash player 9, no performance gain in browser playback with flash player 10 there; so yeah, now it runs way worse in IE than in firefox. The only way it runs at close to the fps it achieves in standalone player in IE is when one uses transparent wmode which leads to all sorts of other problems.

[MikeMD]

Not the case for me. Version 10 on IE7 ( xp systems ) runs almost the same as Firefox 3 version 9 or 10. Meaning I don't necessarily need to use wmode to get specified frame rate ( give or take a couple of frames, and it depends on the game ).

It is definitely faster than version 9 was on IE7 and xp.

I still use wmode because most people are on version 9 or 8 and there drop in fps is at least 5-6.

Vista on the other hand, especially on sytems with a lot of crapware pre-installed is a huge problem. I'm talking about core2duos around 2ghz, and still with terrible slowdown, and we have to assume a lot of people wil be using exactly that type of a machine. Of course this also depends on type of games. I still make mostly sports and racing games with heavy graphics, and those are more affected by drop in fps than puzzles or tower defenses.

[Draxus]

My crapware-free laptop with Vista, a 1.6GHz Core2 Duo and 2GB ram runs most games significantly better than my desktop running XP with a 3.0GHz P4 and 2GB ram... so I dunno about that. I worry about the people with crappy old 2GHz celerons and 512mb ram on XP. I think in general most Vista users are likely to have a newer system and therefore better specs which hopefully makes up for most of Vista's bloat.

[dVyper]

I also have a core2duo 2ghz vista laptop and I've never experienced any significant slowdown with graphic intensive games.

[MikeMD]

core2duo 2ghz vista laptop

I have two with vista, one celeron 1.8ghz with 76 processes running, most games unplayable. another with vista and 2.2 ghz core2duo, excellent machine, but slowdown with some games ( about 65 processes running )

The other two laptops with XP, tuned for serious work ( under35 processes running ) run all games at full speed without any problems

Click on game examples link in my signature and try snowboarding and 3pt shootout game ( top 2 games on the left side ). Let me know how they run. If your machine is crapware free it should run them fine without slowdown.

[Draxus]

They both ran great for me, no lag significant enough to see without an fps counter. My laptop isn't necessarily finely tuned, but it's free of all but the one or two pre-installed programs I actually use. This is in FF3 with FP10, and I had flash and photoshop open while playing them (not that it should matter much, they're not consuming any CPU sitting there minimized, and there's plenty of RAM left)

On a side note though, I had a strange problem with the snowboarding game... after selecting my character (the spikey haired guy) I briefly saw him in the world then a mochiads loader popped up and I was taken to your football game. I tried reloading the page a bunch of times but had the same result. Eventually I managed to play it, but I'm not sure what I did exactly, since I was just trying a bunch of stuff at that point and was unable to get it working a second time.

[renderhjs]

could we get this back ontopic?

read today also about ARM processors beeing supported soon in FlashPlayer10 and AIR
http://www.ipodobserver.com/story/37901

even though the article and most of the others state that its about mobile devices but around next year ARM will release a processor for netbooks as a rival to the Intel Atom processor.
Seeing that Adobe already prepares for the ARM processor is a good sign.

[MikeMD]

sorry about the hijack, just to answer. Snowboarding game does not use mochiads, just scoreboard, so that is definitely not supposed to happen, and I'll post it on their board so they can check it out.

Thanks for trying it out.

[tomsamson]

there´s an ad type for the scorebard so just toggle deactivate ads in the leaderboards section in the ad settings.

[MikeMD]

But Leaderboard ads should only show at the end ( I duck as I hear Woooshhh, sound of a mug thrown by render flying over my head because we are still off topic ) so there should be nothing mochi related going on until the game ends ( boing, cling, crash , mug thrown by render hits the wall ).

Holy *** Batman that was close ( good thing it was thrown at a default 12 fps ).

[dVyper]

If he has CS4 it would be 24fps...watch out...

[tonypa]

I should visit Adobe labs more. Now they have bunch of interesting stuff there:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Alchemy
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Stratus ("With Adobe Stratus you can build... Multi-player games", wow Adobe is using word "games" to promote a product)
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cocomo/