NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

Flash3D - Coming Soon - Sigh…

After reading that Flash will now be moving into the realm of 3D, my response was a heavy sigh, and then a, “Really? Ya Think?”

Considering that this has been the wish of many a Flash developer, plus hardware acceleration, I can’t help but think that this move is a bit late to the party. I love Flash and still use it, but I have been pissed at Adobe for a while with its less than satisfying Flash releases. They could have owned this space a long time ago.  It is one of the many reasons I have embraced Unity3D.

Now I am hearing that this move is the one that will herald the Flash player that will kill Unity. I for one simply can’t see it, at least not yet. First of all, the next version of Unity is coming next month with an array of features that will be hard to match. Forgive me if I am wrong, but isn’t this the first time that Flash 3D is really being taken seriously by Adobe? Unless Adobe has  a super top secret engine in development for the last four years, I can’t see how they will come close to the IDE and performance of Unity. There is a whole lot of catch up to do.

I would love to leverage my AS3 knowledge in a Flash 2D/3D environment, with a player that is hardware accelerated, can do applications as well as games, and work on a multitude of devices, including the iDevices, but now I have Unity. GUI dev is not all that wonderful in Unity, but it certainly is no show stopper. It will not be hard for the Unity to create better GUI creation tools, and thus move into the realm of RIA. It will be a hard and long time for Adobe to produce a 3D engine from scratch and dev environment as slick and powerful as Unity.

We don’t know if Flash will become a 3D interface like Unity, or will it provide the base functions so that you can build your own engine as Ben Garney has suggested in the past, but either way it’s going to be a lot of work.

Adobe: Flash to take 3D graphics plunge

Flash and 3D, here we go again

-DCF

Change and Choice

The past few months have been a roller coaster ride for Flash devs. The events have felt like an action movie complete with cliff hangers and crazy plot twist. Adobe has this new campaign regarding “Freedom of Choice“. I think it is a great move on their part, but I can’t help but think that this whole Apple thing has been a warning shot over their bow. The writing is now on the wall, the coffee is burning, and it is obvious that ‘someone is trying to eat Adobe’s lunch’.

Adobe has had many warnings in the past from its devs out in the field to fix and upgrade various aspects of the player. Improvements have been made, but there was no pressing need to move faster, because there really was no competition. Truthfully, HTML5 is not quite ready for prime time and there is time for Adobe to step it up and make Flash really solid, but that time grows short. Steve Jobs may have inadvertently done something that Flash devs could not do, and that is turn up the innovative fire in Adobe’s boiler room.

If all goes well, I am hoping that Flash will become the general choice for the game console, the video player, the RIA platform, the anything media console for any device, web or stand alone. Flash being the closest to the ‘write once, run anywhere’ pipe dream, and with the most penetration, it just seemed logical that it would eventually happen. This whole Apple stir is business. It’s about who’s going to be the player of choice and ultimately the gate keeper. If Flash did not have this kind of potential, this drama would not be happening.

Choosing Sides

I am more than a little concerned about this 3.3.1 clause that Apple has added to its Developer Program License Agreement. I have been a Flash developer since version 5.0 and recently started getting into Unity3D since the October indie release. I am a PC guy that has been using Windows and Linux. The last three years has been spent doing Flash and some .Net development. My organization was really excited about the iPad and the prospect of building applications for it using Unity and Flash. It just made sense to leverage what we were already using. We ordered an iPad and most of the doctors on staff are iPhone owners. The excitement was in the air that we were about to start developing apps for a device that could become as popular as the Palm had become for the medical community. Then our hopes were dashed with the 3.3.1 clause.

Will we switch to a total Apple development solution? I don’t think so. In fact, the day the announcement was made, was the day that we started considering other options for phones and tablets. If Unity continues to be allowed on Apple products, then we will most likely stick with our iPad development without Flash. If Unity is not allowed, then we will still use Unity and Flash but we will move to another platform altogether. I think that is a bloody shame because the ‘iPlatform’ has such promise.

The 3.3.1 clause is not set in stone yet, but in the obvious blood lust to kill Flash, I can’t see how it could be rescinded unless some really major negotiations occur. Personally, I think that if it has gone this far, then it is close to impossible to bring it back to something amiable. This is like being in the middle of a really ugly divorce and waiting to see who you are going to live with.

Has Steve Jobs gone mad?

DCF

Flash Hardware Acceleration…Coming

When I used to see articles like this, “Hardware-accelerated Flash almost here“, I would have gotten excited and begun dreaming of all the cool things that I would be able to do with Flash. Now I just shake my head, and wonder why it took so long to address this. The ‘Almost’ in the title of that article, is indicative of what has been going on for years with Flash. Too little, too late.

It’s not like there was no writing on the wall. Folks have been saying (begging) for years what was needed to make Flash a truly unstoppable force on the web. Hardware acceleration has definitely been high on the wish list. The potential for Flash to become the ‘gaming console of the web‘ has been mentioned in the past, but it’s like the point was missed as to the importance of games. If the player performed really well with 2d and 3d games (the most demanding of all apps), then RIAs would benefit as well. Meanwhile, many Flashers are looking at Unity for their game development needs.

I am just glad that a fire has been lit under the proverbial arse of Adobe to beef the player up. If nothing else, Apple has sure stoked that fire. Flash still has a chance to secure its position as it is still early in the game, but that window is closing fast. Almost is still not good enough.

DCF

Flash on any Screen

Here is an Adobe Flash promo video that sums up the immediate and assumed future penetration of Flash. Love the idea and concept, and vision. I really hope they can pull it off, but there are many who want to see Flash die and are truly gunning to make it so. Interesting times.

-DCF

Unity Showing Up in More Places

I am starting to see Unity in more places. A buddy of mine sent me a link to The Clash of the Titans site. The site loads with Flash as I would expect from a movie site, but when I get to the game, it loads up Unity. I had to smile.

My kid was eating cereal this morning, and on the back of a General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios box was a link to their brand extending game, Honey Defender. The site itself was in Flash, but the game was in Unity. The game took a long time to load, (much like the early days of Flash) but once loaded, I was treated to a decent 3D adventure based on a Honey Nut Cheerios world. Silly, I know, but before this would have been done completely in Flash.

Axe Body Spray also had a Unity game site as I recall. I think this is just the beginning of brands moving into 3D. Sure the two techs can coexist, but I can’t help but think that somebody missed the boat here and it sure wasn’t Unity. I can’t see it being that much longer until those parts done in Flash, can be done in Unity. Sure, ads are what make folks complain about Flash, but it is funny to see Unity moving into that territory. Very interesting days ahead.

-D

Flash Platform Gaming Technology Center

Adobe announces a site that will be dedicated to game development. With all the growth and change in the browser based gaming space over the past year, I am not surprised. Farmville consumes so many of my friends time it’s not even funny.

Adobe has made some good moves this year, and is in a very good position in terms of browser penetration. Flash has become a big part of the user web experience and has a good chance of becoming the platform of choice for interactive media on the web. Still, as I maintain my Flash skills, I also look to Unity3D simply because of the superior firepower.

Flash is a great all around development platform that keeps getting better, but the Flash player still needs a boost in performance for the gaming side. If Flash gets to the performance level of the Unity engine, Adobe wins big. It does appear that Adobe will eventually get the Flash player to the level of performance of Unity, but just how long that will be is the question. My guess is that with everything heating up the way it is in online gaming, it should be fairly soon.

Adobe Flash Platform Gaming Technology Center

Odd character in Flex, PHP, and JSON

Been busy as all get out these days. Seems like since it is the holidays, things would be slow. Guess this is a good thing. I  have been working on a Flex project using JSON and PHP. Basically, I am using httpService to get data from MySQL using the PHP JSON functions. Fairly straight forward stuff.

I had used this setup in a previous project so the code was already setup. I had my method set to POST in the flex service and was getting the data just fine. All was good until i tried to decode with JSON.decode(). I kept getting this parsing error on a single character. This was the same code I used before, with very minor changes.

I checked up and down trying to figure out what got screwed up. My returned JSON string appeared to be valid. I ran it through the validator and it was fine. Turns out that a question mark was being returned by PHP as the first character of the JSON string. Not very obvious to see just echoing the JSON string to the screen on the PHP side. I ended up processing the string to remove the character before decoding it, but I still don’t know why the question mark shows up in this project and not the previous one.  Very odd.

DCF

Flex HTTPService and IE

I recently had a weird problem with working with HTTPService for Flex. I had been using the Flex RemoteObject along with ZendAMF which was working fine until I recently upgraded and could not for the life of me get everything set up correctly. From what I understand, I guess something got messed up in the packaging of the recent release. I figured I would go back to it later once they got that all sorted out.

Since the data I was pulling was fairly light, I figured it might now be a good time to check out JSON in Flex. Got evertything working just fine, and was able to get records from the database fairly easily. Then I started inserting and updating records and thats when it got weird. Aparently, there is a caching issue with Internet Exlporer (IE).  I was using GET as my transfer method and it turns out that subsequent GETs are cached in IE, so if you try to update your table, you get the same data until you restart the app. Could drive one mad. Firefox does not have this issuse. Once I switched to POST as my method, all went well. Thank God for folks who post these quirks!

Flex HTTPService, Browser Cache and IE

Using Flex, PHP, and JSON to Modify a MySQL Database

D

Long Live Flash

Been reading here and there about Flash being on its way out. Considering that I do a lot of my work in Flash, that kind of talk is disconcerting to say the least. I really enjoy using Flash. It is not the end all be all tool, but it can do a lot and does cover a great deal of territory. I am not married to a particular technology, and I am not religious about the technologies I use. If something else were to come along that does the job better, and has the penetration of Flash, then I would move on in a heartbeat. Flash is simply a tool, and a pretty good one at that.

That being said, Flash does cover a lot of territory, some of it well, and others not so well. For the stuff I am doing for pay, (multimedia based e-learning modules) I can’t see a better or more succinct way to address projects of this type. Flash is simply ideal for what we are doing. 2D, video, animation, and interactivity, complete with database access is just what the client ordered. The fact that we can produce RIAs that encapsulate all of the required functionality in a single organic web interface is very compelling indeed. In addition, one can roll the whole package into a desktop app with little effort. Flash just works, and as long as we code it right and don’t push too hard, it works well. For business and education it can be very effective.

For the gaming side, Flash’s 2d is pretty good. There is some great stuff out there. 3D is so-so. The 3D we’re seeing in Flash is astounding (for Flash), but that’s just it. It’s astounding for Flash, and not for the gaming world. Does it really matter? I really think it does, and is a factor in the longevity of Flash.  If Flash player 11 can make game developers happy in this version, then I think it will be around for the long haul. If not, then maybe the naysayers are right.

The Flash environment has significantly improved with every new release. At some point, it stands to reason (we’d like to hope) that the Flash player could rise to the level of a decent quality gaming platform.  With the big corporate players now starting to pay attention to this plug-in space, anything is possible, and anyone with the goods could take most if not all the marbles.

With all the talk of cloud computing of late, it seems to me that Flash has a good start on the tools for making these ‘games and apps in the clouds’. With a little more work and power to the player, Adobe could potentially gain strong positioning in mobile and games as well as business apps. With all that potential, I just don’t see Flash going away quietly into the night anytime soon, but it does not take a fortune teller to see that contenders have popped up and are vying for this space that Flash used to exclusively hold.

-DCF

HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight?

Why HTML 5 is NOT a Flash killer

Flash for big Games?