Here’s a look at another interesting flash player implementation by Joa Ebert using Java with OpenGL rendering support. It is at an early stage but has the right idea in hardware rendering to OpenGL which is easily cross platform and mobile capable with speed.

This project is pretty new but there is work to make it web browser capable either in a java applet or a plugin for IE/FF/WebKit/etc but there are also others that are out there using alternative renderers. Most of these are in early development with varying support and do not currently compare to Adobe’s Flash Player versions.  However the hardware rendering ones like JITB may beat it fairly quickly once all the other features are added.  Complete OpenGL based renderers like Unity or WebGL are fast and can run pretty heavy rendering because of hardware acceleration for all drawing and native support.

Other Flash Player implementations:

• Lightspark
  • AS3 script via LLVM
  • Written in C++ (very portable for native)
  • OpenGL accelerated rendering
• Smokescreen
  • runs in Javascript/Canvas/html5
  • limited support
• Swfdec
  • Firefox plugin
  • Early development
• Gnash
  • flash 7-9 support

Flash Players that use OpenGL as the renderer are nice because cross platform support is easier.  The reason why OpenGL is a great idea is it is so cross platform on desktop and on mobile, it is also coming soon in WebGL for the browser hopefully.

Versions of OpenGL and support

• OpenGL ES
  • OpenGL ES 1.1 = OpenGL 1.5 and lower (fixed function)
    • Android
    • iOS devices 3rd gen and lessx
  • OpenGL ES 2.0 = OpenGL 2+ (current version 4.1 – shader capable).
    • iPhone (3GS or later), iPod Touch (3rd generation and later) and iPad
    • Android 2.2+
    • WebGL
• OpenGL
  • Windows
  • OSX
  • Linux

There is still a clear open field for an open source player to match something like Moonlight for Silverlight or hardware rendered canvas. WebGL would be great to have in time if it gets support but it is also nice to have a compiled language in the content that works in the player faster than scripting but with the ease of scripting. Plugins are still very relevant if they can address that.

On the web based gaming front…

Google looks to be making a gaming site to compete with Facebook only kicking the gaming up a notch? By the comment from Mark DeLoura, head of developer advocate for Google gaming, it appears they/he also favor going 3d or native client with WebGL or Unity wrapped in the native client.

Check the comment by Mark DeLoura on the gamasutra post regarding the rumored Google Me Facebook like gaming/social site:

I think Flash will continue to be a very viable platform. The Flash toolset is pretty frickin’ amazing, and there are a ton of happy Flash developers out there, and great games galore.

I would like to see higher-fidelity 3D content on the web though. It’s been a dream of many people going back to VRML days. WebGL and Native Client are two solutions to this that will be integrated into the Chrome browser. At Google I/O we talked about Unity running inside of Native Client, which combines the hardware acceleration and security of Native Client with the fantastic toolset and runtime from Unity. It’s peanut butter and chocolate (well, for me). This is a platform I’m really excited about for 3D web games.

Indeed peanut butter and chocolate is mighty tasty.

Alessandro Pignotti’s project looks to be the start of something good to come. Lightspark Open Source Flash Player [github]has some really nice features that should influence the Flash Player and maybe even draw some interest from Adobe?  Maybe it can be like the Moonlight player for Silverlight only broader.

One such awesome feature is OpenGL GLSL hardware rendered shaders for elements of flash. Flash has Pixel Bender which is pretty nice but having GLSL shaders and the use of OpenGL directly is great.

Features

• JIT compilation of ActionScript to native x86 bytecode using LLVM
• Hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL Shaders (GLSL)
• Very good and robust support for current-generation ActionScript 3
• A new, clean, codebase exploiting multithreading and optimized for modern hardware. Designed from scratch after the official Flash documentation was released.

Tim Knip, a papervision core developer, has brought a pipeline improvement for users of Blender to import blender files directly into papervision and as3. This allows you to get at the blender objects, or blender DNA as it is called, that construct the 3d scene within Blender.

Unity3D has a great workflow that includes this where you can update your .blend file and then it updates in the Unity IDE, this work by Tim creates a similar workflow for Flash (recompile would be needed to show if embedded).

Typically exporters are made from the 3d IDE SDKs such as Blender using Python to export to COLLADA or other formats.  But here Tim is parsing the source file directly.  This also opens up the possibility to make other exporters from more simplified Flash AS3 code rather than learning a new IDE SDK just for an exporter.

I am not sure how much people want to embed .blend files with their applications as there is more information in the .blend file for the Blender app and it will add to the download.  But what this might do it inspire others to create simplified exporters from Tim’s work for Blender to COLLADA, 3ds and more that work well with papervision and flash 3d engines, directly in Flash.  So instead of learning each IDE to build an exporter that is the same, this solution could act as a proxy or middle man to simplify exporter creation, pretty much any Flash coder that understands 3d could build one from .blend files at a minimum.  If it was made as a higher level abstraction so the 3d software source could be swapped out it may open up simplified exporter tools a bit.  Since it is really just reading the binary data in the file, in theory other formats could do the same (3dsmax, Maya, Milkshape, etc).

There is a whole host of opportunities with this new tool! It is definitely nice to have this as I use Blender for Flash 3D and Unity 3D most often.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Note from Tim on the tool:

I created a library to read Blender files (.blend) directly. So no
more headaches with broken exporters!

Grab the code here:
http://github.com/timknip/asblender/tree/papervision3d

Here’s a first example:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/438592/blender/PapervisionTest.swf

And its code:
http://github.com/timknip/asblender/blob/papervision3d/src/PapervisionTest.as

ASBlender is simply a library which reads *everything* in a .blend file. So in theory you could grab materials, animations, armatures, the works… But its up to *you* to grab the relevant bits, since *all* the data is accessible.

Of course: this means you need to study the .blend format, see
http://wiki.github.com/timknip/asblender/ for more information.

Sample Code Snippet posted by Tim:

[Embed (source="/assets/crystal_cube.blend", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
public var BlenderData:Class;
 
var blend:BlendFile = new BlendFile();
 
blend.read(new BlenderData());
 
if (blend.scenes.length) {
    // Blender can have multiple scenes, don't know yet how to grab the "active" scene.
  buildScene(blend.scenes[0]);
}
 
/**
 * Prints out the DNA as contained in the .blend
 */
private function printDNA(blend:BlendFile):void {
  var struct:DNAStruct;
  var field:DNAField;
 
  for each (struct in blend.dna.structs) {
    var type:String = blend.dna.types[ struct.type ];
 
    trace(type);
 
    for each (field in struct.fields) {
      trace(field.type + " " + field.name);
    }
  }
}
 
private function buildScene(scene:Object):void {
 
  var obj:Object = scene.base.first;
 
  while (obj) {
    // grab the Blender Object.
    // The Blender Object defines rotation, scale, translation etc.
    var object:Object = obj.object; 
 
    trace("Object name: " + object.id.name + " type: " + object.type + " matrix: " + object.obmat);
 
    //for (var key:String in object) {
    //  trace(key);
    //}
 
    if (object.data) {
      switch (object.type) {
        case 1:  // Mesh
          trace (" - Mesh: " + object.data.id.name);
          buildMesh(object.data);
          break;
        case 10: // Lamp
          trace (" - Lamp: " + object.data.id.name);
          break;
        case 11: // Camera
          trace (" - Camera: " + object.data.id.name);
          break;
        default:
          break;
      }
    }
 
    obj = obj.next;
  }
}
 
private function buildMesh(mesh:Object):void {
  var numVertices:int = mesh.totvert;
  var numFaces:int = mesh.totface;
  var i:int;
 
  trace(" - #verts : " + numVertices);
 
  for (i = 0; i < numVertices; i++) {
    var v:Object = mesh.mvert[i];
 
    var x:Number = v.co[0];
    var y:Number = v.co[1];
    var z:Number = v.co[2];
 
    trace(" - - vertex: " + x + " " + y + " " + z);
  }
 
  trace(" - #faces : " + numFaces);
 
  for (i = 0; i < numFaces; i++) {
    var f:Object = mesh.mface[i];
 
    var v1:int = f.v1;
    var v2:int = f.v2;
    var v3:int = f.v3;
    var v4:int = f.v4;
 
    trace(" - indices: " + v1 + " " + v2 + " " + v3 + " " + v4);
 
    if (mesh.mtface) {
      // UV coords are defined
      var tf:Object = mesh.mtface[i];
 
      trace(" - - - uv: " + tf.uv);
    }
  }
}

• github repo for ASBlender
• Blog post about it by Tim
• Another great tool, .3ds js parser also released by Tim

Gordon, a flash runtime written in javascript, is an interesting project that recreates the Flash Player into svg using javascript from a flash source swf file.

UPDATE: Also check out smokescreen for the same, html5/javascript interpreting SWF files.

This is an interesting direction. There are most likely many things that do not work about this approach for existing content. But it is also a neat way to create new content that might be simple enough to play on desktop and a mobile version.

All these examples work on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

• Gordon on github by Tobias Schneider
• Demos posted for viewing by Paul Irish

Well good news for Flash developers, Flash CS5 will finally compile to native iPhone and Touch Applications. This is great news for many developers out there who have stuck with the Flash platform.  I am sure there will still be limitations to what you can do with Flash on the iPhone and it will probably be mostly 2D games and apps but this is a great start to getting the Flash platform truly mobile and up to the rest of the industry.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.*

A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 with prerelease support for building applications for iPhone is planned for later this year. Sign up to be notified when the beta starts.

I have been questioning why they have not moved to this model before when others are doing so such as haXe, Unity3D and MonoTouch.  Getting Flash on the web browsers on a mobile is hard because Flash is pretty CPU intensive on embedded devices which is really where computers were in the late 90′s and close to 400-600 MHz processors.  Today these machines wouldn’t be able to run Flash very well and that is the same effect you get on a mobile phone.  But cross-compiling to native, similar to how Unity 3D does it or other solutions like MonoTouch and XNATouch, this is the best solution until mobile/embedded devices have 1GHz processors and more than 500MB of memory. Adobe is using LLVM, much like the Alchemy model, to achieve getting AS3 content onto an iPhone/Touch with AOT or Ahead of Time compilation rather than JIT compilation.

So how do you build an application for the iPhone? It’s simple, really. The forthcoming beta of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 incorporates the ability to create an iPhone application. You have access to nearly all the AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 APIs. For example, you can use APIs such as RTMP, Remote Shared Objects, and AMF as well as AIR APIs like SQLite and filesystem access. For more information see the developer FAQ on Adobe Labs.

I am glad to see Adobe finally moving on mobile platforms beyond Flashlite.  Flashlite is a poor solution in most cases on embedded devices because they really need native apps to perform, again due to the hardware limitations and it is a whole new platform to learn. Adobe is doing the hard work to make it easy to get developers content on the new embedded devices that are storming the world such as the iPhone and Touch.

• Info on the CS5 Beta
• Sign up for the beta of CS5
• FAQ on Flash iPhone Applications
• Developer article on how the LLVM cross compiling will work
• Flash 10 full version on all phones by Q2 2010 except iPhone

Claus Wahlers has a great post on some lower level Flash handling for shapes.  He posts about a tool called as3swf which helps to look into the raw shapes and vector drawing calls in the flash engine.

The output of this tool gives the raw machine code/assembly like procedural output that is very similar to other rendering engines. It actually makes me think of OpenGL a bit in the output switch based, procedural flow except this if for vector drawing rather than raster.

Sample output

[83:DefineShape4] ID: 1
  FillStyles:
    [1] [SWFFillStyle] Type: 0 (solid), Color: 666666
  LineStyles:
    [1] [SWFLineStyle2] Width: 200, Color: ff0000
  ShapeRecords:
    [SWFShapeRecordStyleChange] MoveTo: 400,400, FillStyle1: 1, LineStyle: 1
    [SWFShapeRecordStraightEdge] Horizontal: 2000
    [SWFShapeRecordStraightEdge] Vertical: 2000
    [SWFShapeRecordStraightEdge] Horizontal: -2000
    [SWFShapeRecordStraightEdge] Vertical: -2000
    [SWFShapeRecordEnd]

It is always good to know what is going on in lower levels to better code for projects that perform well.  Another great post on this is the Elastic Racetrack of the AS3 and AVM2 virtual machine which describes how the AVM2 handles drawing those low level shape calls in addition to handling script.

• as3swf at github
• post on the tool and more information on shapes in flash at a low level
• ‘Elastic Racetrack’ for Flash 9 and AVM2 another lower level article how the flash player draws at runtime
  

Silverlight 3 has been released a day early.

Microsoft has released Silverlight 3 to the web a day earlier than expected. You can go ahead and grab Silverlight 3 RTW build 3.0.40624.0 (4.69MB) from Microsoft.com/Silverlight. Version 3 supports Windows Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3/4. In addition, the Silverlight 3 SDK (9.5MB) and the Silverlight 3 Tools (32.2MB) have been posted on the Microsoft Download Center. (arstechnica)

As Silverlight versions go it is quite impressive and pretty much a complete solution now including desktop save support and full set of tools for RIA development (early versions were only Javascript or had limited controls libraries).

Granted there are lots of years of gain that Flash has on Silverlight but the path that Silverlight it following leads right to Flash.  Hopefully this will lead to more innovation on both sides (they might need it with Google Wave pushing html5 <canvas>).

One very nice element of Silverlight since it has been released at verison 1.0 is the HD video support.  It has gotten better with each release.  This release has smooth streaming support that is pretty impressive for web video.

Interestingly they chose the open source Blender Foundation project Bug Buck Bunny to demonstrate the smooth streaming feature. Ryan Rea has a bit of analysis on how well the video plays across a quad core and memory compared to flash hd video.

More on the Silverlight 3 new features here and here.

• Install Silverlight 3
• Silverlight 3 SDK (9.5MB)
• Silverlight 3 Tools (32.2MB)

Roy Schestowitz plays the flip side and calls this a ‘silver-lie’ released and has lots to say about the Silverlight 3 release and even using Big Buck Bunny to demo it. He states a true fact that up til now lots of companies have abandoned Silverlight in favor of Flash (mlb, nyt etc).  It is still used at Netflix but that has an XBOX deal to play Netflixon xbox360.

Flash didn’t really get good until version 4.  Typically software is a real version at version 3, that is when most software has the goals and ambitions of 1.0 fully complete and integrated.  We shall see how things play out but I still think Silverlight has a long way to go in winning over developers, myself included, but competition is never a bad thing when you are wanting to see innovation.

haXe is an interesting programming language that allows abstracting the source from platform target.  It outputs for targets such as Actionscript and Javascript from haxe language source. But, haXe can also output to native code to run on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Well because of this it is possible to run haXe on the iPhone. The gamehaXe site has found a way to get haXe to compile to iPhone via hxcpp which creates a C++ output from haXe code very similar to Actionscript 3.

I am a bit late to the party but this is great news. It uses the NME library which will allows code to mostly be written to the Flash 9 API and create the C++ for XCode to compile and run on the iPhone and Touch. This creates a path to port Flash games to iPhone/Touch.

This project is one to watch and participate in.  Native compilation to the iPhone from haXe is a more simplified code to write in while providing lower level performance which is needed on mobile devices, as processors, cache and ram are much lower than desktop and below what is capable of running the Flash AVM2 currently.

If you have more interest in haXe there are some other great demos on as3/haXe at the game haXe site. Also, Tony at touchmypixel.com has posted some very useful information to help you get started with hxcpp.

The hxcpp project is a newer output target along with a java one but this could be interesting if actionscript like code and many libraries like Physaxe or AS3 libraries could be ported to haXe to output to the iPhone.

Rozengain or Dennis Ippel of AKQA updated probably one of the tools I use the most for flash 3d and that is the blender to as3 exporter.  This simplifies loading in the meshes you have and lessens the bulk of the COLLADA format.  COLLADA is great but flash is still client side and fairly memory intensive for 3d so loading in models directly to as3 is nice if flash is your presentation tool.

AS3 Blender exporter has been updated to allow multiple object export. Also in April is was updated to export quads and modifiers.

One concern you might have is statically binding the code within a main swf fileon compile and resulting file size compared to loading in the DAE dynamically.  But you can just load these in as you would external DAE COLLADA files as compiled swfs and since it is just code it is very compact.   This adds some duplication of code (such as tweening libraries or the 3d engine source as needed) but allows a more horizontal loading or lazy loading of meshes when needed.

This is just another option to get 3D models into the flash 3d engine of your choice in addition to COLLADA, some MD2 support and limited ASE support.

This is an awesome project that keeps getting better, thanks Rozengain.