Jon, Well, I am leaving the "cool" factor away, but it is still cool. Honestly, I don't really care about porting quake or any other super pop tech... neither sound nor graphics rendering software. Porting the ranking system of a b&w version of pacman is already scary enough!
As you point out, having access to a tool ( or even just a cheap methodology ) for porting c/cpp code opens a new world of possibilities, and drastically changes the rules of the game. Basically, it is now business to create a library and become the first to have it in AS3... probably not an evident niche to the rest of us because AIR has not hit the streets yet, but I can bet more than one company is doing something in those lines. Take the very same Adobe and their Flex IDE as a cannonical example... how long would it be, after the release of such piece of machinery, before someone ports a compiler generator et al and gives something like FLEXible a final push to completion. Or someone creates a solid migration tool from another UI technology with established IDEs to Flash? Of course you might argue that the flex framework is unparalleled with binding, repeaters, events, effects, etc. ... but isn't it opensource already? and with respect to other technologies, now that the ideas are on the table, it's just a matter of playing catch up... which will be quite fast given that, as Scott Peterson emphasizes, we can even port interpreters for other languages. And what about LCS?? It might not have a contender right off the shelf but, hey, having the ability to port libraries puts me much much closer. And closer to building something better! Or even something that runs with MS technology in the backend. Of course this would definitely lean the balance against silverlight and other contenders in terms of developer adoption, but at what cost. If part of the player is OS ( correct me is im wrong ), the framework is OS, and now we can port code and run it in Flash... what's left for Adobe to profit from? Perhaps acrobat...? or Media Server? ( oh.. red5 ). So, wrapping up, I think this announcement deserves a LOT more attention that what it's had. They somehow opened Pandora's box with that short demo. I just don't see a clear business strategy behind the move. I might be missing very important point but with my current understanding this scares me a bit... quite a bit to be honest. After all, some of us are betting on the sustainability of this platform. To a certain degree, Adobe might be shooting themselves in the foot with this one. I am very interested to hear some informed opinions. Thanks, Aldo On Nov 2, 2007 5:40 PM, Jon Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > On Nov 2, 2007, at 4:27 PM, Matt Chotin wrote: > > > 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. > If the only change was to the ByteArray class then all I have to say is ... > > ... damn. > > Now all that remains if for you guys to post up that converted AS3 code for > peer review. Quake is open source ya know ... :o) > > - jon > -- :::: Aldo Bucchi :::: +1 858 539 6986 +56 9 8429 8300 +56 9 7623 8653 skype:aldo.bucchi
