new flash player with GPU support

[tomsamson]

"Wow, world war 2.5(between the dino and the zombie) got avoided......"

Haha, reminds me of a scene in Idiocracy, anyway..

Btw, for Squize and me its not about battling it out, its more about if the two sides will ever get to real friendship state again

Regarding the moving to other options what is a good option for someone depends on what kind of things he wants to do, which platforms he wants to reach etc.
I usually try all sorts of stuff at least for a few days if it sounds interesting enough to me, but usually then end up using those solutions most which allow deploying to most platforms while also allowing to make good use of the hardware features at good workflow.
I rarely use very platform specific solutions and only then when their functionality justifies using those enough that it is less important in that specific case than being able to deploy to more platforms.
I could write lengthy about trying monotouch,xna,udk,unity,flash, html5 specific stuff etc and their upsides and downsides for specific use cases, but yeah, i´d suggest you think of what sort of stuff you want to make, on what kinda platforms you´d like to release it right away or down the line and then look around what kind of solutions allow that.
If someone isn´t doing game dev purely as hobby he´d also have to consider which solutions actually offer any kind of reasonable way to make money with the content, so that might weigh in on the selection process, too.

[Incrue]

If you're targeting games for portals then it's fair to say that most of the gamers keep their software pretty up to date.

But if you rely on players updating everything its still nonsense to use flash because of this tiny gpu support since they will have unity.

[realMakc]

people on pre-release group seem pretty optimistic about new player (not that "square" thing) but they cant really give any details before MAX.

[realMakc]

p.s. there is this tweet that may be about FP11 3D performance, or maybe not. take a guess

[rumblesushi]

Makc, that's interesting and promising. If that's even half true, they must have made array access magnitudes faster, or they are using a directX transformation/culling pipeline.

Right now in FP10, simply iterating over an array of 3 million polygons runs at 5 frames a second. That's without transforming the vertices and without culling the polygons.

[Squize]

"But if you rely on players updating everything its still nonsense to use flash because of this tiny gpu support since they will have unity."

Don't develop for the new player then if it's such an issue. Honestly, I'm not here to defend every point raised.

I'm on the beta program, but I've only d/loaded the new stuff today and I've not got time to play with it for a while yet anyway, but I'm looking forward to giving it a bash.

Squize.

[Squize]

Well, I'm a believer,

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/molehill/

Squize.

[tomsamson]

yes, looks very nice. Yeah, i was thrown out of the previous flash beta due to constantly moaning about many things, especially the iPhone packager and its performance (its no beta information anymore as everyone could just go out and try to see how content made with the current packager runs), so i´m glad that at least Adobe finally listened to all the moaning ones and got rolling.
I guess they felt the heat to some degree what with web gl and others starting to take shape and others like unity leaving them behind on many fronts.

As usual with flash pre release announcements one should still take things with a bit of caution, even if the demos look wicked, there could still be nasty limitations in the fineprint. Like for example they haven´t talked about a similar improvement for the 2D handling side at all, though their site for it on labs makes it sound as if the old api driven stuff and ide made 2D stuff would perform as bad as always. Hope that won´t be the case when they ship it.
A lot also depends on things like how many graphic cards they support nicely, how well their software rendering fallback works etc etc.

But besides those thoughts in the back of my head i look forward to this quite a bit

[mr_malee]

toggleFanBoy(true);

[tomsamson]

Haha, nice one =)
I for sure won´t become a blinded fanboy easily again, not even in joking, but yeah, at least finally there´s hope again that there could be a really exciting flash release once again after a long while of crapware releases.
Hope they don´t screw it up in the finer details.
Also while at hoping and wishing: now that they actually have something interesting in the pipe again it would be great if they fired the guy who threw me out for asking for improvements and then they could bring me back into the beta cycle again.
or not.



[edit]no need for insults, even if deserved [/edit]

[rumblesushi]

Excellent. I'll be able to quickly integrate this into my existing 3D engine and start pushing thousands of polygons

Looks superb, and judging from that performance, probably better than Unity.

Well who knows, getting 30fps+ on that demo might require a monster CPU and GPU, but I reckon it'll be at least on par with Unity.

What interests me the most is what they're doing about the array access speed and RAM usage to even make transforming/culling a few thousand polygons possible. Array access in the current FP10 is so ridiculously slow that simply checking that many polys and transforming the vertices, with no rendering at all, runs at a snail's pace.

Exciting though, proper GPU support is what I've been requesting for ages.

[mr_malee]

@tom, I was referring to myself

Its great news and I hope they don't stuff it up like most of everything else they do. 3D aside, this will be great for 2D games too, from the site:

Today, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, renders thousands of non z-buffered triangles at approximately 30 Hz. With the new 3D APIs, developers can expect hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles to be rendered at HD resolution in full screen at around 60 Hz.

[swak]

Gaming device support in Flash Player is in its early stages, and we have not yet finalized dates for its availability in a future public release.

That's cool. This will be an interesting addition.

[tomsamson]

@rumblesushi: slow, tiger. I mean the part where you compare it to unity3d. It looks like a huge jump for flash but the demos shown there are nothing that wasn´t possible with unity in better form a few years ago.
They´ve got time to improve things further just like to make them worse though, so let´s see where it goes

@malee: yeah, i imagined you were referring to yourself, my post was more thinking about whether i´d go into fanboy state ever again after reading your comment
And yeah, that will be a very important point whether everything done in the ide, no matter if using the visual tools for 2D raster graphics and vector graphics editing are used or the old as1/2/3 api stuff will all be accelerated like that, too or if its "only" about being able to have that kind of gpu acceleration when using the new api additions, which would restrict and limit its usefulness a lot (would still be nice of course if that side by itself doesn´t get screwed up in some other way).

Well, yeah, a lot of let´s see and ifs there, at least its interesting again more towards positive potential side.

[rumblesushi]

Tom, I dunno man. After being wowed by that Island demo, I've been disappointed by every other Unity demo/game I've played.

Perhaps Unity isn't that easy to use, but although the Island demo runs very well on my laptops with dedicated GPU's, most of the other demos I've tried run like ****, I mean laughably slow. It's either that or they were using some high end shaders and lighting that are beyond the capabilities of my graphics cards.

Plus given the poly count of the cars especially, I think that demo is pushing more than any Unity demo I've seen.

But like I said, I fully acknowledge the possibility that the car demo is running on a monster of a machine, and would also run like **** on my laptop, and probably most people's too, so it might not be the best judge/benchmark.

We'll wait and see what it's like on an average rig. I want to ask Adobe for a pre release play with this API actually, and give them feedback etc. What would be the best way to go about that do you think Tom?

BTW Tom, I can almost guarantee you that existing work is going to be unaffected by the GPU support. It's surely just going be like a DX/OpenGL call from C++, feeding the GPU a list of triangles to render etc. Still hugely useful for 2D stuff, just have every object represented as a 2 triangle plane, and voila, everything is drawn on the GPU.

[tomsamson]

Yeah, sure, for that to be usable also from within the flash ide (not just on codeside) and no matter which AS version one uses, they´d have to redo all the vector/ raster graphics handling side so that it would be handled automatically behind the scenes.
I find it unlikely that they´d do that hence (probably with excuse of not wanting to break existing content and wanting to stay more hardware independent with that old core functionality). So it will probably be restricted to be used when coding things using the new api and not work with all AS versions and neither for all the stuff one can do graphically in the IDE now, at least initially. I´m doing an educated guess out of my b.. there but hey, usually i have a good hit rate with that


Regarding the performance of their demos: Well, of course it is to be expected that they ran those on some quite nice machines so yeah, one shouldn´t come to any conclusions regarding performance, especially not knowing how previous Adobe performance showcase videos were usually made (running in ideal case scenarios and/or with ideal case devices, and then one for example actually has an android device and wonders why that flash video running in the browser on it runs at something like 4-8 fps..).

So what one can judge already is the content and the technical complexity of it, like shaders and effects used, as far as can be seen from looking at a youtube video. And yeah, on that side its nothing what hasn´t been there in unity games, they even lack many things like full on realtime environment reflections and things like particle effects,skidmarks etc.
Maybe have a look at some of the more recent demos on the unity site or some of the EA made unity games and some others, the island demo is pretty old now.
Of course, yeah, how it runs still might vary depending on your machine, i´d be impressed though if Adobe can get anywhere close to what unity achieves, even if it was just on performance side for considerably basic stuff.

Regarding getting in on a beta preview, well, basically you can do two things: get in contact with someone you know at Adobe or someone close to them and ask directly or apply to a beta on the Adobe site.

[Incrue]

@rumblesushi
Fixed length vectors<> are way faster then arrays, you should try and see

[rumblesushi]

Tom - could you recommend me a Unity demo? Because the Island one is still the most impressive I've seen, and one of the only demos I've viewed that has a solid framerate on an average laptop.

Incrue - Only for floats and integers, basic data types. For classes it was actually slower until recently, now they access classes at identical speed. Even using numbers, just vertex coordinates to transform/cull, the vector class and AS3 is still too slow to transform/cull say 300,000 polygons. What I think must be happening is they are offloading all the transformation/culling to the directX pipeline, so Flash doesn't even have to iterate over vertices/polygons at all.

[mr_malee]

I hate the programming in unity. I hate component style coding, no application entry, no base, everything floating around in some locked management system, objects receiving updates by overriding functions. I haven't been able to get into unity because of its forced coding style. UDK is much better but is still in a very non friendly state. If Flash can get this beta out early 2011 I'll be very happy.

[tomsamson]

@rumblesushi: Not a lot into googling around for links now, a good starting point is usually the unity gallery page: http://unity3d.com/gallery/ and several of the EA games are on facebook.

Malee: Its of course personal preference which working style and programming languages you prefer. Me personally i like it that one can code in C# (sorta comparable to AS3) and unityscript (quite like javascript/ actionscript 1).

I don´t get why you´re disliking overriding functions since basically that´s not so much different than setting up let´s say an enterframe handler.
One can btw also do a mostly single application entry and monolitic approach as one usually is suggested to do it in flash these days, but yeah, that´s working against the strengths of doing things in parallel and the general strengths and idea behind the unity setup.
I know, that side can be a stumbling block at first, especially if one is stubborn on doing everything as far as possible in flash style monolitic old coding manner approach.
Me personally i quite like the unity approach, still could be refined here and there but i definately like it more than doing stuff in AS3.
Its sorta like a more implicit class/ object hierarchy structure where a solid game framework and parallel processing setup is already in place.
Once one gets used to it one can actually get things together quickly and still have them be quite reusable much more so then in flash, where usually either things are reusable but complex to set up (let´s say class framework done in flex/flash in AS3) or hacked together but then not that reusable (example: AS1 code in various places on the timeline, not reusable at all cause one can´t locate code and not reuse code placed on frames).
In Unity one can have script/class files which are seperate files and still throw them onto objects or into prefab (sorta like components one can create quickly).
I also like many other things about it like that one can just have all the asset workfiles like psd files, 3d max files etc in the project and set the import settings and they can be used in the game then, so let´s say one makes a change in the psd in photoshop, hits save, switches back to unity and its auto updated instantly with right import settings, such things are pretty cool.
Regarding UDK me personally i like some of UDK´s editor functionality but not the language used a lot, yeah, to each his own

Yup, let´s see what´s Adobe´s final date for shipping their thing in polished usable form.