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Ok, I have one major complaint...........
Unless they are planning on releasing a huge upgrade for director, why do they still not use any kind of 3d import abilities?
I still dont get it, everyone and ther brother is trying to mimic 3d, and they have this great plugin over at director that makes great games, but is in an outdated program.
Why do they refuse to implement the director 3d plugin into flash? This is all they need to do to make flash the end all app.
Like Tom already answered you can still embed swfs (created by some old version of Flash or exported from practically any vector drawing program) or bitmap graphics.Quote:
Originally Posted by MD004
You may also go hardcore and only use drawing API (which is exactly same engine drawing vectors in swf) and code all the graphics. Every animation you do in Flash can be done through code too (see the new "convert animations into code" feature for Flash9).
Or you can load external graphics when game is run.
i hope the CS3 fixes some of the memory problems, don't know about anyone else but in many recent projects (almost every single one) my graphical assets will not export until i navigate to them inside their movieclips and scrub the time line. Not sure if its my computer with bad RAM or flash. But its damn annoying.
When playing the movie gfx don't appear at all or flash when animating.
And its weird because one day its working and the other its not. Sometimes i'll open the fla, all is fine, then maybe the next day i've got graphic problems. Another weird thing is that this problem has only happened with work projects using allot of vectors for animation.
anyone experienced this?
nay
is this a publishing problem, or just in the IDE?Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
both.
Director crashes the browser quite a bit more. I wouldn't want functionality that compromises stability, and flash is actually very stable compared to nearly all other plugins.Quote:
Originally Posted by everfornever
Relying on graphical accelleration would also result in vastly different performance on different machines, even more so than flash has currently.
Also, plugin size is still an issue, good player penetration results from keeping it as small as possible.
Don't get me wrong, 3d accelleration would be great, and the hardware support would make 2d graphics much faster as well, but I don't think Adboe would hold out on this unless they had good reason to.
Hmm, ive seen this kinda stuff get unreliable in the IDE, but not when published.Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
It sounds like a memory problem, or a bad install of flash.
bleh :DQuote:
Originally Posted by lesli_felix
There are lots of reasons why director acts way less stable on many machines in comparison to flash like it allows runtime extensions which people often use to add nifty but not very stable custom functionality of their choice, next up director didnīt have a nice clean restart with a second fresh vm and language like flash did,instead it just got cluttered up more and more over the years; i could go on but you get the point :) .
sure no one wants functionality that compromises stability but adding 3d card/openGL support doesnīt have to automatically mean less stability.
"Relying on graphical accelleration would also result in vastly different performance on different machines, even more so than flash has currently."
This is only true in certain limited scenarios. Like if theyīd go for adding the lowest spec openGL/3d card support your statement would probably be off cause it can be pretty much taken as granted that everyone has at least the oldest specs supporting 3d card by now (if not he probably couldnīt enjoy web and games on his machine at all anyway cause its that old/outdated).
The current state is that performance of flash content playback varies A LOT cause everyone has a different cpu and runs a different amount of apps in the bg,all handled by the cpu. If a gpu would take much of the load i think the performance on different machines would be more similar than it is now.
Only not if theyīd go for adding the latest high end 3d specs (which they surely wonīt do).
One option i thought of would be if the flash developer could turn opengl rendering on/off at runtime or maybe during export of the movie,that way you could still create content which doesnīt require even the oldest 3d card but in return rely all on the cpu again.
"Also, plugin size is still an issue, good player penetration results from keeping it as small as possible."
Sure,the smaller the better, on the other side with nowadays web connections a 1.5-2 mb plugin isnīt that bad. (Especially not when its about showing media heavy content like games where one often expects the user to have a highspeed connetion anyway).
I think the Macromedia/Adobe guys learnt a lot from experiences in the past and would now stepwise include the lowest denominator specs into flash, so minimum spec 3d hardware support is the next logical step.
Personally i think itīll be great once flash content is accelerated by gpu support,2d stuff just like 3d stuff will benefit a lot.
Besides that i think they have to add it with the next flash version if they donīt want to loose lots of ground against MS with their expression stuff.
Sorry for the nitpicking but yeah, the arguments against acceleration support for flash get weaker and weaker as time passes and i canīt hear them anymore as benefits would outweight them so much.
Sure it all boils down to how small they can get the plugin,how stable etc but if done well it will be the next major step for flash and its about time :)
Weīll all have fun taking AS3/F9 to its limits, but yup,in a year or two many will have passed the limits again and it would be great to have the barriers pushed further again then :)
I dont agree with you, Tom, in many areas :)
Basically, saying that everyone who visits the web these days has 3D card and openGL installed and ready, is over-reacting. You could expect that from hardcore gamers, but Flash plugin is used for so many other things.
Jono summrised it in the end well, people expect Flash player to run every Flash content. They dont care about directX version or hardware acceleration settings, once they can see web pages they want to see Flash stuff.
As we can see from Director, basic 3D support is not enough. To get "real" 3D you need to download and install extra 3rd party plugins. This alone scares off most people. If Flash had basic software rendering 3D, nobody would use it as the result would still be bad, slow and ugly compared to real 3D.
Ofcourse Adobe has Acrobat 3D already so combining Acrobat Reader and Flash Player is still possible.
and yup, i donīt agree with what you said a lot either,its nice to discuss views though :)Quote:
Originally Posted by tonypa
how come? i mean sure you can only expect from hardcore gamers to have the latest specs supporting high end graphics card but the majority of any new pc sold in the last 5 years should have at least basic 3d gpu capabilities on its graphics card,no? To my experience they donīt sell 2d only graphics cards for a good while already.Quote:
Originally Posted by tonypa
My point was in comparing how new/powerful has your machine to be to run flash content at nice performance at all (common things like youtube videos for example) if its only handled by the cpu with how new/powerful it has to be to at least have a way old 3d enabled graphics card...
For me it seems like for many content types a way older 3d/opengl/directX specs supporting card would do a fine job while if its only handled cpu side you need a quite fast cpu.
I also didnīt completely make up that thought by estimation, i just remember very well how several years back some company came up with a custom flash player (with openGL rendering capabilities) which allowed content to be run silky smooth in fullscreen mode on my back then way old machine which had a voodoo 3d 1 card.
Without 3d card support,handled just by the cpu the same content already choked in small window (since my cpu wasnīt powerful enough to handle it).
That made me think some how flash content,even just 2d (vector) anims could act if flash had 3d card support..
sure, i agree it should be done in a way in which the end user who enjoys content doesnīt have to bother with such things a lot. I just think the end user has to bother a lot for his hardware specs right now,heīll often notice how some things just donīt run smooth cause he has a too slow cpu.Quote:
Originally Posted by tonypa
who says basic 3d support isnīt enough? sure its not enough for some but better than none at all ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by tonypa
Also gpu side rendering support wouldnīt be only good for 3d stuff but also for basically anything graphical, so of course also 2d handling.
Before AS3/F9 code execution and display handling/rendering was slow,now thanks to the f9 player and the improved language code execution is way better while display side stuff is still slow and that gets really annoying.
Basically you could do so much more on the codeside than what can be handled on the display side,its crazy.
I never bothered with acrobat 3d stuff so i canīt say much about that. Anyway, bundling acrobat reader with flash plugin seems like a good thing (as long as thereīs also still the seperate flash plugin alone download option,which,well,would probably mean the 3d handling functionality canīt nest only in the acrobat reader plugin to allow flash plugin profit from that)Quote:
Originally Posted by tonypa
Don't be so quick to assume that just because Flash uses "vector graphics" that it could benefit from 3D hardware acceleration. 3D hardware depends on everything being made of triangles, with mapping coordinates, and a texture applied to those mapping coordinates. They are two very different beasts. Small problem examples: You would lose anything that is drawn as a "curve". There would be no easy way to handle gradients. Tweens would have to be handled completely differently. etc
Basically, the whole engine would need an extra "translation" layer between Flash and openGL, negating the benefit of hardware acceleration. (Or at the very least/worst, authors would have to adhere to a set of very strict restrictions on what you can or cannot do in Flash when aiming for 3D hardware support).
For the last 6+ months I have not really been working in Flash at all (but just can't help visiting here). I've been working in Virtools, a 3D game engine. I can say with absolute confidence that any 3D added to Flash, yet still working within its framework would have to use a software renderer, OR resort to displaying within a window, like how it is in Director.
I wouldnīt mind some AS3 code set that accelerates rectangle perspective transformations - or a solution where you can define your own matrix/ grid for that.
I am not a fan of the 3d- thingy either because Flash has itīs orgins and tools all around 2d. Like Ray Beez said itīs a complete different world and it wouldnīt work very well with so many unique things flash already offers like the animation timeline, the great drawing tools or the easy way creating buttons.
Most Flash things that impress me are purely 2d- stuff and there is still soo much to do there. Flash blur, shadow & glow filters already pointed a new direction but I think there will be more with flash.
What I could think of Adobe once could implement in Flash would be some kind of GPU/CPU accelerated particle system (water, crowd, drops,...) that would be easy to integrate in AS but als easy to use on the timeline with assigned layers wich function as collision layers. Just like real game developemnt (PC,consoles,...) physics, advanced motions, AI & complexity will be things that will determine Flash development in the future as well imo.
Oh and about Virtools: I have made some little things with it as well but I dont like the interface at all, also the documentation and the online resources are the worst Iīve ever seen.
all not true (besides translating layer needed maybe but the flash audience neither the flash content developers should have to worry about that), as iīve tried that custom flash player with hardware acceleration some years ago and it could display normal flash movies without issues. The main downside of it was that as they didnīt have the entire flash player sdk down they couldnīt add full code support which restricted movie functionality to,well,movie playback functions mostly. Sadly i forgot the name of the player,maybe someone else here has tried it to and remembers the name.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Beez
On a sidenote virtools is nice but its hardware acceleration is not exactly comparable to what iīd like to be added to flash player. Virtools goes for pretty high specs (or more allows content developers to go for pretty high specs) which automatically leads to more issues among different hardware setups,besides that virtools wasnīt exactly acting great on different setups right from the start. Its a bit different when its about the standalone playback but yup,sadly virtools browser plugin has several issues.
Besides that,yup,as i said before iīm totally convinced that unless Adobe adds hardware acceleration with flash 10 they will loose lots of ground as the contenders are catching up with time
(and yeah,if i just think about my own situation right now iīm enjoying a lot the new code execution performance plus of f9 but iīm sure in a year the display performance lacking will annoy me enough to get bored of flash again if things donīt progress well on that end).
Quote:
Originally Posted by renderhjs
I think there much of the misconception has its roots: Once people hear 3d card acceleration they think its only about 3d stuff and that all would go for 3d or its only good for 3d.
Thatīs just off, as i said before once the gpu helps on the whole display handling pretty much any graphic related thing would get a huge performance boost.
You do a 2d game with tons of particles moving around? No problem. You have vector animations, Again,no problem (Sure, within certain barriers, but you get the idea, those would be pushed further a lot).
Also since you talked about it: Sure all those filters and blendmodes introduced with F8 are great,also generally beeing able to do bitmapData manipulation at runtime but at the end the graphic handling side is just too slow to allow to combine many of those things at once on a bigger display region, so there goes all the fanciness.
Again,iīm not begging for the latest directX10 specs support,that would be nonsense, all iīd like would be if thereīs enough hardware support to speed up the the display side a good bit overall.
i digged a bit on google now to find the player again i was talking about earlier, here it is:
http://www.globfx.com/products/swfplayer/
(download the swiff player)
Now there are several things to consider:
first of all this has been released several years ago so it of course only supports older version flash movies ( i think flash4 or 5 max).
Next up as i said they didnīt have the flash player api fully down so what runs best is animations/graphical things,thereīs few to no code execution support.
But yup,besides those limitations (which adobe wouldnīt have of course if they would add hardware acceleration to their flash player ;) ), it is still just as impressive as several years ago when i tried it the first time.
What it can do is that you start it, choose a flash movie, toggle on "use hardware acceleration" and then you suddenly have display handling performance thought impossible before with flash.
Playback of fully vector animations in fullscreen at silky smooth performance, supports for display effects: viewing the content shown as 3d plane, as 3d slices (each layer is an own plane in 3d space at different z position) and 3d cube, hereīs a screenshot:
http://www.stimunationgames.com/fk/s...playInCube.jpg
I donīt think flash player would need those fancy display content in 3d effects (though it would be a nice bonus), but yup,the performance increase of the display side is huge and thatīs what iīd like ;)
Also iīm sure Adobe could implement that way better and more stable (though personally i didnīt have any stability issues with this one either) than a way smaller company with less experience in flash player dev who did it on their own.
yep, the CS3 thingy looks nice and cool ... lots of cool integrations and additions, plus the old crappy notepad-like code editor which I love so much! Actually it's the 1st thing I went checking... I was like "If they changed the code editor I am not gonna buy it!" :p
Anyways dunno guys if you've checked the prices, the European ones :yikes:
Gosh, prices are almost doubled, compared to the US ones.
$199 for upgrading Flash == 290 == $380 (!)
Not to mention if you wanna buy the top of the line, the "Master Collection":
$2,499.00 in the US, 3.598,80 in EU == $ 4800
With that price you can fly in the US, have a nice 5 days vacation, buy the master collection and come back home with still some money in your pockets! :p
Lapo
I'm with Tom, i would love for accelerated graphics. I know close to nothing about GPU's but i thought that you could pass off geometry calculations to it so as to take strain off the CPU, which seems like part of the problem now (with 3D)
is it not possible to switch between hardware and software without pause?
is it not possible to use a combination of both? like i mentioned above: 2D renderer, Hardware used for geometry and 3D calculations.
Speaking as a Mac user who does supposedly have a hardware-accelerated Flash Player, I've got to say: I can't tell the difference. It's still as sinfully slow as it's always been. Budget computers in my school's IT room outpace my Mac when it comes to the Flash Player (although having said that, my dad's Intel Mac runs Flash content incredibly well).
so is the download bigger for Mac's because of this added openGL support?
if what Ray said is true about openGL with tweens and gradients and all that vector data then how does the Mac produce them?
- my memory problem is temporarily fixed by clicking on graphical assets in the library, seems i have to manually add them into memory :)
to Lapo (btw, hey there mate, long time no hear, hope youīre doing fine :) ) :
I see youīre kinda disappointed and yup, i agree on most of your points.
I didnīt moan a lot about the CS3 release, overall its very welcome that the whole Adobe products work way better together and also the new features for flash do seem nice.
Of course the nicest beeing AS3 and the way improved player but yup,many already made use of that in other ways, still a great improvement there.
Personally i also didnīt bother much to check whether the code editor has been improved some, since they didnīt hype that part a lot i expected few improvements and anything other than a major overhaul of it is pointless imho ;)
I didnīt worry a lot cause i already gave up on the internal code editor ages back,switched over to tools like scite and then to fdt for eclipse and then with as3 i got flex.
Still i understand that those (many) who are still coding stuff in flash IDE are begging for a propper code editor update and i think Adobe would do good in finally adding that with flash 10. (Heck,if flash IDE gets code editor features like fdt iīd like to code more stuff in it,too of course :) )
Also i totally agree on your crits regarding the euro pricing,what is it that makes some companies believe europeans must be so much richer than US people that they just donīt care about ridiculously way higher pricing?
Some argue with higher taxes, transport and other costs but come on, that doesnīt make up for such inflated prices.
One of the things that really has to change.
And yup, indeed iīm one of those thinking about how to get the US box over to me. This one is really not funny.
But to end with more kind words on the release, overall i see this as nice transitional step/ merger release for all adobe products, its not a bad thing at all (way nicer than i expected things to become when hearing macromedia got bought in first place, mind you) but yeah, i expect way, way more in the next release to have kind words on that one then.
sure geometry/physics calculations handled with hardware acceleration would be cool,too but right now with f9 player the code execution already got so much speeded up that it way outpaces display performance. One can have tons of 3d calculations,physics code etc running smoothly,just once one tries to plot that all to screen,move lots of stuff around and apply effects the display renderer canīt keep up.Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
to my understanting: no.Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
I think there has to be a short pause where things are switched over so one would probably be best off doing it at app init or by the user toggling a button to do it so he knows whatīs up.
(Different topic, but i think the implementation is nice: The latest flash player supports fullscreen playback switching as some might know and once one switches that on, thereīs a short standard message poopping up telling the user whatīs happening and how to stop it if not wanting it, think thatīs one good way to do it if its about letting the user turn it on/off at runtime)
I think the rendering side would benefit more from hardware support as i said above (cause its the more lacking side right now with cpu handling) though yeah, i guess they could split up the work in some way between cpu and gpu,but yup,the flash player team could probably give a better comment on that.Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
(btw glad your memory issue is solved :) )
Mac player doesnīt always and in general run with opengl support,it only does so if you have a certain mac generation,use a certain browser etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by VENGEANCE MX
If you donīt have any good playback performance you probably donīt have the right mac/browser combo.
Thatīs also the thing that annoys me a bit,iīd like it if there was the general support for the lowest denominator 3d card/openGl rendering support specs on all major desktop platforms/OS, right now you have an advantage on a very specific certain setup cause yeah,theyīre only into adding as much as the system gives the player with that setup . Letīs have at least the lowest spec support on all platforms and weīre a huge step further.
I think Macromedia was a bit ahead of the time with Shockwave director back in the day when they added hardware acceleration, 3d cards werenīt as common as they are now and highspeed web connections were way more expensive and way less widespread,too so plugin size mattered way more,too.
(Next to many other reasons for it not reaching its potential like the director plugin was already cluttered up before, director never had a strong open source dev community like flash which would max out the capabilities together, 3d art creation was way more expensive and done by way less people than now etc etc)
With flash they are going the opposite direction, so more like squeezing out as much performance as they can with the current setup before they stepwise (and in small steps) add higher hardware requirements. I think thatīs a good thing in general, but yup, on the web connection speed,user hardware standards and technology is evolving with big steps and as i said before, i think its about time something gets done on that end to keep flash as dominating as it is right now.
would be super if an Adobe tech guy hung around here and gave us some inside information about where Adobe's heading with Flash.
Maybe Adobe's forum could give more info.
thanks for clearing those 3D questions up tom.
np and well,you could post something on tinicīs blog: http://www.kaourantin.net/
(He already posted about limits of software rendering there not that long ago)
i like this quote
so umm, do something about it :DQuote:
It really does not matter at that point, without GPU hardware support there is pretty much nothing we can do anymore on modern CPUs when it comes to graphics performance.
I just hope flash isn't completely changed around~
I had a hard time learning how to make new frames the first time :)
haha (what a noob)
Wow, alot of great info going on in here.
Thanks for the cool links Tom. I'll definitley have to check those out when I get the time.
Been really impressed with what I'm reading for Flash CS3. I really like the idea of changing animations to actionscript. Always had a hard time doing animtions with as so I'm sure this could help. Also help with file size too. The debugger and script assistence sound great. I've been alot of the guys at work always complaining with how AS debug doesn't work like VB or some of the others. Even alot of the new animation tools sound cool. Should help with quicker design's and great looking graphics.
http://www.kaourantin.net/archive/20...s_archive.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by tomsamson
Requirements that Tinic lists:
Quartz Extreme compatible graphics card (definitely got that)
Safari web browser (which I use religiously)
OS X 10.2 or newer (I have 10.4.9)
G4 or higher processor (I have a G5)
'Course, when I use Shark to profile Safari, I don't find any OpenGL processes, but profiling the standalone player, I saw a GeForceFX process (ie, my graphics card). Not really sure what to make of that. Tinic also mentioned the OpenGL profiler, but I really have no idea how to use it.
[EDIT] Mr_malee, PowerPC version of Mac Flash Player is 1,863 Kb. Universal Binary (for PowerPC and Intel processors) is 4,097 Kb.
Tom, I'm shocked to hear this from someone of your experience. If it could all be done so transparently, then why is something as simple as "cache as bitmap" something devs have to conciously turn on? and why if anything within a cached movieclip changes dynamically, the caching turns off and all speed benefits are lost? Why wasn't the caching ability just hidden in the player engine for all to benefit from if it's that simple?Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsamson
I just checked out that Swiff Player and it is SLOWER than Macromedia Flash Player 8. Whatever man... I think you just don't understand the limitations required for using 3D hardware.
youīre comparing apples with bananas there, cacheAsBitmap is something completely different than the topic weīre talking about here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Beez
The topic here was that the gpu would help out with all or some rendering side workload to reduce the heap on the cpu.
CacheAsBitmap doesnīt do something like that, what it does is that normally a vector shape would be recalculated new each frame refresh and to avoid that for shapes which donīt change, the shape is cached in ram (more its bitmap representation). That way you get around recalculating it the next frame or any frame it doesnīt change. The problem is that once it changes,as long as you have the feature turned on, it would have to get cached again in its new form so that would lead to slowdown, thatīs why it can be turned on and off.
As i said one thing to consider with that player is that its way old so you have to run equally old content with it, maybe you tried a newer movie with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Beez
Still, iīve tested several older flash movies which were made up of vector animations and where my dual core (not that that helps much with the current player) 3 gig cpu canīt handle them smoothly in fullscreen playback this player could do so (while also allowing 3d effects like projecting the animation on all sides of a cube rotating in 3d space).
See the screenshot of the xiao movie i watched with it.
(also youīre sure you turned use hardware accelartion on once running a movie?)
I also said that Adobe probably could implement things better than the developers of that thing could do. Iīm sure this wonīt run equally good on various systems due to few/no testing/implementing ressources on developer side.
I think Adobe showd pretty well with their previous beta releases and test phases for some player versions that they can pull of such new tech introduction quite nicely,so yeah,iīm not really worried they could pull it off nicely if theyīre into it.
Another new version of Flash, another big debate about 3D and openGL support.
It's like the F8 launch all over again :)
Here's a little prediction. When F9 pops out, how long before the thread entitled "What do you think of Flash9?" has a statement along the lines of "Well, they've done nothing for game developers, why couldn't they have done <whatever>".
Yeah I'm back from a week in the sun to dirty smelly rain soaked London :|
Squize.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
well,this time such ramblings seem to pop up shortly before the new version is finally released. My hope is that with the next version the requests come up early and with loud (many) voice(es) enough so that thereīs something done about it for the upcoming release ;)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
welcome back blue :) sorry about the weather :( (in case that helps: it rained here today,too )
What is the lifespan of software release date versions? I'm thinking a year and a half, but the gap between After Effects between 7 and now seemed relatively small this time.
The timespan between software version releases varies a lot, but yeah, i have the feeling it got shorter and shorter,too. (And youīre right in case of After Effects it was really short).
You have to see for yourself if there are enough useful improvements and additions in your eyes to make it worth to buy the new version. I only saw a short video bit regarding additions in the newest After Effects, the bone pupped animating feature seemed kinda nice (looked like it would allow to place markers on a still image to then animate that as if it was a ragdoll).
I agree: The decision that a lot of people usually make at times like this is if the ends justify the means of purchasing new software at the expense of how recent your old software is. Like I didn't know Adobe was going to flat out re-release everything, including AE7...otherwise I wouldn't have bought it. But now that I have it, I don't see me buying another until at least the next one comes out. I haven't looked at the specs, but I'm pretty sure that the new features wouldn't warrant buying AE again. 7 is pretty solid as is.
Plus I thought Flash was coming out a bit later than April (a lot of people was talking June-July).
I do think it's finally time to move on from MX if anyone still has it as a flagship piece of software (I have Studio 8 right now). I do hope it lasts awhile though. CS3 looks pretty good overall.
Master Collection? I gotta win the goddamn lottery :D
i get the feeling Adobe and other major corporations act like the advertising industry, always gotta stay fresh and keep people interested. New releases gets everyone excited again and i like that. It also brings in allot of new people or people from a different area of programming and design
yeah,exactly. Also since MS is about to make a big impact with their expression suite as it seems it kinda turned into a race of the big boys..
well its not only a race in the 2d- industry but 3d as well. Just insanve how short the release span lately has become for major packages such as 3dsmax or Maya- they even release .5 packages wich are in 3dsmax always the most unstable and worse releases.
Kind of sad,- I am happy with some new releases but as already said some dont qualify that much for a new version. After effects is just one of them.
I'm gonna skip Flash CS3, like I did with Flash MX 2004. All I need from CS3 is AS3, so I'm sticking with my Flash 9 Public Alpha. And if that ever expires or anything, I'll start working out how to use Flex instead.
I think the problem Adobe is having, and will increasingly have is which of these products do what. What I mean by that is they are starting to overlap in what they can do. And Flash especially has always tried to be all things to all people. The logical next step is for Flash 10 to incorporate some of Directors goodies, and that includes hardware acceleration. Even with all the issues that come along with that, its something which really needs to be done. I'm sure they can do it in such a way so we don't end up with wildly varying performance. Flash primarily needs to be a website/rich media creation tool, with (and I hate to say this) games being 3rd. Having said that, theres more then enough in F8 alone to keep game creators like myself happy for the next 2 years.
dont underestimate Flash Lite 2.1,- I could imagine that even the next flash Player still doesnīt support 3d hardware trianglization- because one major strength is the paralel stream the flash platform follows- all with the same package (pc,ppc,mobile,game hardware (PSP),...). If they try the horrible plugin dependence like director not only it would split the dvelopers (the ones who like working with it/ who can and the ones who dont) but also the platforms and as such a big lost on clients and platform.
I mean how ****ty would that be if a website informs you that your graphic card doesnīt support DX9 and thus abborts the website (reminds me of some other company)