James Merrill skriver: > http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html > > A new version of AS3 will be nice, it's just too bad no one wants Flash > anymore. Flash player is basically dead in the water, with its future usage > being hardcore gaming. How many of you guys/gals are doing that? > > >
I find this lacking. Let me break down the promised features: 11.2: * Mouse lock: rather trivial, but a real new feature. * Right and middle mouse-click support: Stolen right from AIR, not new * Context menu disabling: Almost the same thing as the previous point, it is just a logical consequence. And it is also stolen right from AIR and not new at all. * Hardware-accelerated graphics/Stage 3D support for Apple iOS and Android via Adobe AIR: Not a new feature, just improving the implementation of an existing one. * Support for more hardware accelerated video cards: Ditto * New Throttle event API: I thought that this was already in the shipping players? * Multithreaded video decoding pipeline: more performance improvements that isn't a feature So in total: one genuinely new feature. One and a half feature stolen from AIR. Cyril: * Keyboard input support in full-screen mode: Stolen from AIR and was just an intentional limitation * Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio: Personally interested in this * Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content: Sounds fun for the 3d people * LZMA compression support for ByteArray: I think this one is stolen from AIR. And it is a trivial feature too, just some misc headers IIRC. * Frame label events: Because framescripts are evil (they are not) Much better total here: 3 new, 2 stolen. Running total: 4 new, 3½ stolen. Dolores: * ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads): Yay threading! It might help a bit with those long running tasks, but really, it is not as much of a game changer as you'd think. It is of course important to be able to max out all cpu cores, but really, there is a lot of details you have to keep in mind there. * Support for advanced profiling: To vague to be deemed a feature * Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards: Again? Just read what I wrote above. * Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS: To vague and not even close to a new feature. * Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment: Vague, but still enough to call a new feature * Release outside mouse event API: Pathetic, but a genuine feature And we are back with mostly trivial stuff, but the threading pulls the big load here. 3 new features, none stolen Running total: 7 new, 3½ stolen. Next: * Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base * Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine * Updates to the ActionScript language This is just really a work list, not a feature list. But there is a feature like list for the last entry. * Stringent static typing as default, with optional dynamic typing: dynamic stuff just hurts developers more than it helps. Get rid of the easily abused stuff and keep the dynamic features properly walled off. * Type inference: Someone must have looked at the new c++ standard and fallen in love with the auto keyword. * Hardware-oriented numeric types: a bit vague, but a step in the right direction. Lets just hope this doesn't turn into the mess of c and c++ primitive types. So in total, there isn't a lot of new features being listed here. There is a few good ones, some stolen from AIR and some trivial ones. Overall, it is nothing too major. What disturbs me is the complete lack of animation related features. Adobe seems to have abandoned all the animation features in Flash since CS 5. They don't believe in their own product (for this purpose) anymore. Anyone remember Flash 8 when they added brand new drawing features? Now that was a step in the right direction for the animation. The player hasn't gotten any animation related feature since then. Pixelbender doesn't count, since it is badly implemented and poorly supported. No real animator is going to use it. Only programing geniuses like me will ever use that. If you ask me, Adobe needs to get the animation part back on track before the competition runs past them. Of course, Adobe can't ignore the fact that Flash is more than an animation tool either. They are doing (mostly) the right things for those parts. But they are forgetting where it all began. _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
