Great! I will have to look into that. Thanks!Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeChambers
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Great! I will have to look into that. Thanks!Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeChambers
Iam confused. :( And when I say this I speak from the perspective of manyy flash developers. What should I buy now? Flash8 or Flex2 or wait for Flash9 the next year to get a thread infront of me saying [News]ActionScript 4.0?
I was just starting to get the AS2 syntax and blam this! Man..... :( :( :(
Maybe Mike replies to this,too, so just my two cents on it for now:
Ok,one by one:
If you want to be able to use all the wicked new features flash 8 introduced, get that one.
If youīre into building RIAS, Flex2 may be good for you.
(Have a look at the Flex 2 presentation here to see if its interesting for you:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/a...o_of_kevin.cfm
).
Now to Flash 9, it will take quite a while till that is released (Macromedia is planning a normal dev cycle duration so it would be around 15-20 moths or longer) as full version.
Macromedia is going a really unique and great way with the development of flash9. for the first time in history they will release early alphas of it next spring. That means that developers can actively influence the development by giving propper feedback. It also means one can use many great new things before the actual full version release. Still the full version is quite a bit away so all this flex 2,flash player 8.5 and even more flash9 talk is talking about alphas,not full version apps being released next week.
On your worries if AS 4 might be released quickly (assuming you thought it was such a quick change from 2 to 3),they worked on AS 3 for quite a while now,sure if you were just thinking about swapping to AS 2 it may sound like a sudden again language swap but actually its been quite a while since AS 2 was introduced.
If you take it from the good side you can equally jump right into AS 3 now :)
hmm.. maybe we could all have a go at this "speaking from the perspective of many flash developers"?
For a long time (since F4 days lets say) it's felt like we've been in the shadow of Director. While Flash has been solidifying it's position as #1 plugin in the browser market, and it's simple frame actions have grown into a full language, it's older brother Director always had the really cool gizmos, the chick-magnet fashion accessories. It had them first, had them in quantity and quality, and had them on steroids! So that no matter what Flash would get for Christmas, no matter how cool or interesting, when all said and done, they would always be nothing more than Director handmedowns.
And it's true. Look at the functions Director8 had; copyPixels(), draw(), fill(), floodFill(), setPixel(), getPixel()... and woah! now Flash8 has these!
And then Director8.5 had "shockwave 3D" and Flash8.5 will have... *drumroll plz* a 2nd VM. Koolio.
Anyway, oftentimes, when talking about Flash and it's many weaknesses, and particular of it's lack of speed, the standard response and concensus opinion has always been "why would Macromedia jeopardize Director sales by making Flash any better or faster?". So by this analogy, MM was the cautiously coaching parent, Director the handsome and promising adolescent quarterback, and Flash the prepubescent acne covered computer nerd.
Like yeah, who are you gonna back??
..So the dot-com bubble came and went, both Director and Flash have grown and matured, and now there's a new kid on the block - Flex! He's both dexterous and smart! He can benchpress obsolete hardware with one arm tied behind his back. Now Mr M.M. (just married to Mrs A.) has a new and favorite step-son!
Just when Flash and Director have dropped out of highschool and started parttime work as "IT professionals", all daddys attention can now turn to lil' Flex Jnr.
"GO GETTEM FLEX!" :)
You mentioned Director and I happened to try some Director games today, so I downloaded and installed the plugin and the games still wont play. I dont care what clever extra they are missing, I wont play them. That is something I hope Flash player never has to go through - getting so big and loaded up with all the cool gizmos that it actually stops playing.
I dont know if it was the fault of Director plugin or the game makers, but when I visited about 10 different sites without the plugin only 1 bothered to show a message about me being directorless and even that didnt give me link to download the plugin. I hope we dont make same mistake and expect every visitor have latest Flash player installed.
Before i wrote what i did, i was about to say exactly that! Plz. NO XTRAs in Flash!!
thanks for picking up on my thoughts. Flash didn't just win the plugin battle. Java and Director forfeited it.
Iam interested in making games. I guess I'll just keep learning AS 2.0 for now and will convert to AS 3.0 when the next Flash9 will be out. Will buy Flash 8 next month.
I'm in a foul foul mood ( Designers decide what the hell you want and maybe just once stick to it before deciding you want something totally different the exact second it's coded and working ) so this may come out more full of bile than intended.
The main issue I see, albiet prolly only a minor one in the grand scheme of things, is that of adding extras to games.
Since 7 I've been running version checks ( I've never written for anything above F6 ) and if it's found added extra eye-candy to use that extra cpu speed.
Perhaps it was just me being stupid ( Not unknown ) but I kinda figured that f8 would still generate the same byte-code when publishing as 6, so I could add nice little filters here and there and people on 6 would be blissfully unaware, and those with 8 would have pretty images to look at. K that doesn't work, and I've not had time to do it the other way, publish it as 8 and see if it works in 6 ( Which I imagine is prone to all kinds of errors ).
With the new VM it seems this problem could be happening but on a bigger scale, so we could have ( Almost ) compatability issues. Say for example you code the sweetest Flash game ever using 8.5, you're dependant on the new VM, you've written code specifically to target it and it flies like it should. But under 8 it's a bit of a turd in comparison. Does this mean we're going to get a two tier Flash ?
As developers we're hungry for more speed and power to make more impressive games ( In theory ), and I bet if given the chance a lot of people would rather target an ultra fast 8.5 than the boring old 8 player. How many game players are going to care about having 8.5 or 8 ? Are games going to need a "You need to upgrade your Flash player" ( Which is as much of a turn off as having to download extras for Director imho ) prompt before being able to play your game ? Or are we going to have to ignore 8.5 and wait til 9 so everythings nice and equal again ?
Extra pissy rant about nothing I know... it's like my version of moaning about the lack of mac mousewheel support.
Squize.
It wont run at all with Flash player 8. You can only make 8.5 games with Flex and it produces only 8.5 files. If you want to have separate versions of your game then you have to make 8.0 game with Flash and 8.5 game with Flex.Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
Really ? I should have read up before spouting my venom.
Although that still introduces a two tier system in effect... actually prolly best to ignore me today, I shouldn't post when in such a red mist mood.
Squize.
You're PROBABLY correct. :D
hey there mate,i get youīre getting pissy about designers telling you back and forth what (not) to do and changing their mind back and forth when they please.Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
But yeah,regarding the rant itself i disagree on several points.
First regarding asking people to upgrade to a newer player:
Yeah, we could all live without forcing people to update things,then again whoīd still want to use a x86 pc because he wasnīt eager to upgrade for the newschool stuff?.
Its just the way it goes,who wants to experiewnce better content has to update his hardware or software once in a while.
So i donīt see that as huge problem,its common practice in the whole computer/software/hardware industry.
also weīre in better position as game developers there as normally game players are the one sub group within people using pcs/macs who are most eager to quickly update their hardware/software to expereince new age content.
Its also a huge difference if youīre asked to upgrade your 8 mb (or more) director plugin or the comparably tiny flash plugin.
I donīt get what you all moan about,for ages i heard the request for more performance;now we get it and some moan that content made specifically for the vm2 of 8.5 player could be incompatible with older players.
So what? All my 3d card acdcelerated games are "incompatible" with machines not having a minimum spec featuring 3d card.
If the content shows why one needs to upgrade, the ones interested in the content will upgrade (iīm talking about games here specifically)
You can still do flash 8/7 and older player targeting content for flash player 8.5 as it also features the old VM,so if you want to stay with the "old stuff" while the new player isnīt that established yet.
But yeah,if you want to make use of the whole set of new features and improvements of 8.5 youīll have to target for that player.
Trust me, it's not. This is all nonsense.Quote:
since they seem to consider this 8.5 player a large improvement over the 8 player
errrrm..right
can you enlighten all of us with some..facts?
Every new player will run 5-10 faster than the previous one ( they always say that, never fails ).
If that were true we could be running Doom 5 at 120 fps in Flash by now. Take out a calculator and do the math.
It's just same old PR nonsense.
How much faster is player v. 8 than v 7 was????
Exactly, not much, is it? ( it was supposed to be up to 30 times faster according to MM.
yeah,thatīs what i wanted to hear,arguments and facts one can talk about.Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeMD
i just donīt like it when someone posts something like you did before and leaves it at that ;)
I agree with you on the point that in several updates it was said that the new plugin version was this and that much faster.
i wonīt blame anyone now for that as on the one side i know why its done and on the other (and thatīs more important) it wasnīt a lie really.
You could gain more performance with things done in f7 than ones done in f6/5. And using cacheAsBitmap for vector graphics or a bitmapdata driven scroller for games one can gain a lots better performance with f8 than with f7 (no need to discuss that,both has been shown here by several members,compare a standard f7 scroller running smooth at around 25 fps while a f8 scroller with bigger window achieves around 90 fps).
Ok sure,i know why many felt cheated maybe: They were expecting a total,general for each and everything better performance,not better performance when doin x in way y. I understand that. totally.
Iīm a developer and would have loved to get the generall no matter what you do 1000% more performance for everything,too,of course.
Ok,when discussing why we didnīt get such a general performance boost recently here,it was said that to be honest one can tweak the small things here and there to gain some extra speed,but without either redoing the plugin,giving it a jit compiler or 3d card acceleration it just wonīt get a total general for everything performance boost.
And guess what,the plugin has been redone from the ground up and has a jit compiler now with 8.5
sure, one can sit there in a painted black room and think all is bad,but come on,if thereīs a glimpse of light and not just a small one,why insist on saying its black and will stay black all the way?
Me,personally i can only guess what drives the politics of a company but to me it feels like MM had that director thing going for a long while. Its still solid on the kiosk market i think but it seems obvious that they are trying to market flash heavily as the web plattform and donīt even think about director being a contender for flash in that field anymore. director now is clearly positioned for kiosk offline and flash as web plattform.
I read the post a bit above stating things in the sense of "they wonīt give flash everything director has as they donīt want flash to deminish the director market".
Well,that was the thoughts of flash developers for quite a while but i think thatīs really outdated now.
I think its more the case that macromedia learnt from the positive but also from the negative experiences with director.
Yeah,director is powerful,but that bloated way with accessing 3d cards,supporting extras and what not all has also lead to it falling back in actual downloads and polularity a lot.
With Flash they want to brand it as the platfform for the web, which should run on as many os as possible,if possible also on average medium spec machines with a reasonable low plugin size.
so this time around they are thinking wisely of what to add and what not to add, how to keep compatibility as high as possible while still also trying to accomplish developer needs and keeping filesize low.
Iīm sure they could have easily dropped 3d card support features similar to those of dirctor into the flash plugin too.
Weīd instantly have way higher performance for pretty much anything graphically done. But the cost would be an exploding plugin size.
Also way less compatibility and reach.
No, instead they chose another option for now which was redoing the plugin form scratch and giving it a JIT Compiler and other improvements which still make it possible to gain overall better performance without bloating the plugin to even double size.
Not a bad thing i think.
Most likely it's not a bad thing ( we'll have to see to make sure, I don't really know much about this flex thing or how Adobe will affect development of Flash ).
It's just nothing to get excited about ( at least not yet ).
well,its nothing to get exxcited about for you maybe.
Thatīs ok,good to have your own opinion. I know lots of other developers who canīt wait to try the new player and AS3 :)
7 days to go,maybe youīll be excited once trying it for some days,too
..actually the opposite. (tonypa got it ;)) i said that thus far they've given EVERYTHING Director had to Flash (with the exception of hardware support!). They not only went after the Java users (Classes) and now even oldskooled C users (speed, syntax and webness) but also existing Director users dissolutioned by Xtras & plugin reach. If you're a long time Director aficionado, you might now be having a hard look at Flash 8-8.5 features, or Flex for that matter. But MM prolly soon realised they are as much likely to gain another Studio sale, than just exchanging 1-for-1 a Director sale for a Flash or Flex sale.Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsamson
Same goes for Flash users now considering Flex. Or even new users considering Flex vs Flash vs Studio.
um 2 VMs? possibly double surely?!Quote:
instead they chose another option for now which was redoing the plugin form scratch and giving it a JIT Compiler and other improvements which still make it possible to gain overall better performance without bloating the plugin to even double size.
I agree this direction (not adding hardware support to the player) is a totally good thing, and helps solidify flash in the cross-platform and internet-appliance markets (incl. linux appliances, cellfones, portable game devices, tv boxtops, etc) ..so the Player's effective reach doubles, triples or quadruples 'going forward' as they say.
The only other market we'd all like to see would definitely be DVD menus, but it looks like Java has got non-proprietary favoritism going for it. But i'd imagine most savvy hardware manufacturers would eventually be looking to support Flash just for the instant mass-userbase and cross-functionality support.
So as you say Tom, from the Flash Player/Developer point of view, the future is looking very much brighter with the VM2 approach. :thumbsup:
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeMD
Rendering performance was improved in the last player and code does get executed slightly faster and flash movies use less memory thanks to the new garbage collector. Macromedia didnt state that actionscript execution speed was 'x' times faster for this release. However, that is one of the main factors behind Flash Player 8.5, performance.
The new AVM; AVM2 features JIT compilation which makes the player alot, lot faster straight away.