Flash Runtimes Update

With Adobe AIR 3.8 and Flash Player 11.8 now in beta – I’d like to highlight some of the really neat new features being implemented in the runtimes. Many of them are pretty major and have been sought after for some time now…

Flash Runtimes Update

Want to catch up on release version features through guides, API references, and tutorials in a concise list form by version? Adobe has you covered with the excellent Flash Player and Adobe AIR feature list!

You can always see what’s new through this special area What’s New area of the ActionScript® 3.0 Reference for the Adobe® Flash® Platform.


Here’s what’s coming…

Recursive stop on MovieClip
For Flash Player, this feature allows a game developer to effectively pause/stop a running SWF without having to iterate through all of the objects on the DisplayList.
[API reference]

4096×4096 texture support
With this feature, a new profile, BASELINE_EXTENDED is introduced in the class flash.display3D.Context3DProfile, which will support a maximum texture size of 4096X4096.
[Download the updated ATF Tools]

Rectangle Texture Support
Rectangle Textures are now supported in BASELINE as well as BASELINE_EXTENDED profile. The texture formats supported for Rectangle Textures are BGRA, BGR_PACKED and BGRA_PACKED.
[API Reference]
[Starling Support Incoming]

StageVideo on AIR desktop
We can FINALLY use StageVideo on desktop!
[API Reference]

GameInput
This has also been a long time coming – Game Input APIs!
[API Reference]

Also of note… Sandboxing enhancements, Datagram Socket (iOS & Android), Server Socket (iOS & Android), LZMA SWF support (iOS & Android).

Bill Howard also released some info today on what is being worked on for the future in a more abstract way. I’ll simply reuse his slide, below.

Upcoming Roadmap Items

[Recording of “Online Meeting with Adobe”]


Other important, related matters…

Flash Runtimes Roadmap
The official roadmap documents will be updated soon.

Gaming SDK 1.2
Coming soon! Updates to all included frameworks, AIR SDK 3.8, adding Away Builder tool, adding GamePad support.

Apache Flex – Lots of work in the Apache Flex space going on. Monitor the developer mailing lists to keep up on what’s going on. Also be sure and attend 360|Stack in Denver this August for a complete overview!

Flash Professional CC – Drops on Monday the 17th! Totally rewritten from the ground up to be modern, performant, and extensible. REBORN!
[I’m giving a talk on new features next week]

Scout CC
New version of Adobe Scout that allows for Memory Allocation Tracking!

BB10 – Blackberry has added support for Stage3D on their platform. Developers rejoice!

Adobe SWF Investigator preview 5
Adobe® SWF Investigator is the only comprehensive, cross-platform, GUI-based set of tools, which enables quality engineers, developers and security researchers to quickly analyze SWF files to improve the quality and security of their applications.

Apache Flex UI Builder
A sort of standalone design view for Flex! [Github]

Robotlegs 2.0
Robotlegs is an ActionScript Application Framework. It offers: Dependency, Module, Command and View management.

4 thoughts on “Flash Runtimes Update”

    1. Bill has said there is a problem with the current [beta] release notes for FP/AIR x.8 – I can only imagine this carries over into something more complex such as the livedocs. You could always ping Bill on Twitter for clarification. He’s stated that he is trying to be more social :)

  1. So exciting. I will be waiting for release and will be releasing bugs I found on this.

    Going to be such a fun.

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