The demo was on a custom Flash Player but my understanding of the only real change is that he made some performance improvements in our ByteArray class (that we can hopefully incorporate into a future release). As part of the demo I believe the sound was not actually coming out of the Player, but the graphics all were.
This was definitely a research project, we'll see what happens in the future but there's no immediate release plans. From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jon Bradley Sent: Friday, November 02, 2007 11:34 AM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Aha... did someone say C/C++ to AS3??? On Nov 2, 2007, at 12:30 PM, Aldo Bucchi wrote: It is THE biggest thing I have seen so far related to the flash player. It's cool, no doubt. There are questionable elements to that demonstration. Although it was primarily running in the Player, it's likely that the actual rendering was done using low-level within a modified version of the Player. An interpreted language is just not fast enough, and there is no way the current Player version couldn't approach a 30fps playback speed with the graphics of Quake. Something has to give somewhere. Details are not plentiful enough to fully evaluate the approach. - is this real? To some extent, it sure is. Pre-processing C into other languages has been around a long time. This is the first time a lot of people have seen this approach because they don't come from a traditional software dev. background. - when should we expect this to hit the street, if ever ( we need to get prepared ya know... ) It's R&D tech. I don't think this is to be expected anytime soon, but I could be wrong about that. - hmm what happens with licenses... can we just port EVERY open source c/cpp interpreter, codec, lib, etc to as3? Licenses? This is kinda moot. It's the possibility of porting C to AS3, not whether or not it's legal. Could you port over mp3 codecs? Sure you probably could, but you'd have to pay dearly. damn. this is one of those things that make me question everything about everything. It just changes the rules of the game completely. It is too good to be true, and at the same time too bad... i'm confused. Remove the coolness factor for one moment of being able to see Quake run in the Flash Player. Then wonder how modified that Player version was... Quake is available open source. Why in the world would you want to put it in AS3 - aside from absolute coolness factor? We have to remember target audiences here. Gamers expect cool ass graphics and high framerates. Even with hardware acceleration, you can't fine tune memory management and eek out as many CPU cycles as you can to get the best playback. Try getting the PhysX libraries to run at a decent rate in an interpreted language.... To me, it means more libraries are available for use to AS3 (or 4) developers. Those libraries are already there and we can already use them. We just have to port it by hand. Just like the PNG and JPG encoder were ported by Tinic. Took a bit of thinking I'm sure, but it works. The absolutely cool factor is the amazing speed at which they demonstrated code being ported over, questions about implementation notwithstanding. The technology is highly cool, no doubt. I'd just keep focus on what it really means at this present time - a faster way to get more code into Flash. Heck, I'm excited because I might be able to resurrect some pretty complex projects - complex for me, 8 or so years ago - that were built in Codewarrior. :) cheers, jon
