Monday, October 20, 2008

Flash 10 may also suck

I tried the Flex 3.2 SDK, with the Flash Player 10 debugger version. It turns it everything worked quite well, according to adobe labs page. I forgot to set the target player to 10.0.0, hence i got a bug by the player not recognizing rotationY properties. but that worked fine after a few hours of messing around.

What really took me away is how easy it was to play around with the new 3D api. x,y,z, rotationX, rotationY, rotationZ. the new Matrix3D, Graphics 2.0 API e.t.c They worked quite well. One glitch was flex would not recognize the GraphicsTrianglePath Class. The compiler would complain and say that the class did not exist at all.

I then tried playing with the new sound API, but i was welcomed with a cold shoulder. The Event.SAMPLE_DATA property was undefined. (Seemed it was a coding bug. Somone might have forgot to name the property to "sampleData".). You could have a work around this however it seemed that the "sampleData" event was only fired once, and it would sample properly. That kinda really sucks. there is no way you could harness the power of the new dynamic sound API. :(

Flex had problems with code completion in graphics, Bitmap, e.t.c. It would not import the BitmapData class. :( Wierd stuff all around.

I tried experimenting with the Adobe Pixel Bender 1.0, It has good support of libraries, functions, for loops e.t.c , however it seems that from tinic's blog, that the flash player doesn't use any sort of GPU acceleration, and only suppports a really small subset of Pixel Bender Specification. :(, you cannot have while/for loops, no function calls e.t.c

I would have loved adobe to keep flash player in beta, and not make a release version , with all this bugs, it kinda spoils the image of Adobe.

Further Adobe released the CS4 Suite without letting the trial version out, so I could confirm if the Flash CS4, also has similar bugs.

Overall Pixel Bender has alot of potential, so does the new Graphics API, although I would really love to give us the full power of openGL in flash, by making something like a openGLSprite. flash still does not support z-depth-buffering. All the libraries out there have to make hacks by using z-sorting, BSP Trees, Quad Trees e.t.c

openGL works on windows, linux, macs. I see no reason why Adobe would have cross-platform problems with that. Come on Adobe give us openGL power.

As much as I agree the crap API of openGL, Flash engineers could revamp the way we do 3D, by adding some libraries such as native physics engines e.t.c

The Gaming Market makes as much money as Hollywood market, Adobe should seriously consider this, and not let M$ make the first move with silverlight with its DirectX.

No comments: