Adobe Introduces Premium Features for Gaming with Flash Player 11.2
blogs.adobe.com
blogs.adobe.com
And good riddance. The Flash runtime is probably the worst target I've ever developed against, made worse by the smug and arrogant blogging of the core developers (which pops up in the search results when googling bugs they caused, which in that context is infuriating).
Haxe runs loops round their AS3 compiler, in speed, stability, bug count, and code optimization, and there's pretty much no feature of the Flash runtime that doesn't contain well known and crippling bugs reported years prior.
It's the quality of one of those crappy little proprietary tools you get from vendors, except it's the biggest platform in the world.
The day HTML5 overtakes Flash, I'm going to pop a cork.
<3 Flash <3. And I can't blame Adobe: Everybody is making billions on gaming, Apple takes away 30% of all of it. That's crazy! Adobe now has the most awesome tools, probably invested a lot. I can't blame them for wanting a piece of the action. And the best part: If you don't use BOTH Alchemy and Stage3D you don't have to pay a dime. <3
Flash is famous for bugs, security holes, instability. You must be living under a rock if you are unaware of these issues.
Oh, and next time you call the parent a liar, you might want to make sure his job is not a Flash game developer, as Michael Reitzenstein clearly has more than a few hours of Flash under his belt.
I regret my ranty tone of my original post, but I stand by my criticisms of the platform. Flash had solidly won the chicken and egg race for web plugins 10 years ago. Success since then has not been based on technical merit, they've just been coasting.
Only when WebGL was already implemented in a sizeable proportion of browsers did they even bother to put 3D in the platform! Name me another instance where a company has been out innovated by a standards board and maybe I'll retract my point.
And all the AS3 core functionality runs pretty solid, please show me these mayor bugs you talk about. I've also been a game dev for many years and started out at Flash before finding my place with one of the bigger studios. I still use Flash regularly to bounce ideas around and I still love it. If you really run into that many issues with Flash these are probably performance related and you should probably move on to a higher level language because you have outgrown the AS3 api.
This is absolutely appalling. I'm actually kind of shocked, although I really shouldn't be at this point.
Wow. What utter fools. Hey adobe shareholders, fire your BoD and sack your incompetent CEO in your next round of layoffs.
Edit: Sorry for the vitriol, but this kind of gouging is just inexcusable. Especially considering what you're really getting for the money. Udk is already going to run 25% off gross revenue, toss in another 30% for facebook's cut and you're down 55%. Now adobe wants 9% of your remaining revenue? For what, exactly? Opening a few measly APIs to allow the player to actually access the engine that's really doing the heavy lifting? The udk royalty makes sense, it's getting you access to a world class set of dev tools and a fantastic engine. What the fuck is adobe's 9% actually for? The privilege of running your code in a mediocre vm that doesn't even have proper gamepad apis? Fuck.
You forgot Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5 for $699. At 3 licenses at $50k in revenue, that'll put it quite a bit above 10%.
The fast memory access has been available since Flash 10 days and usable with HaXe.
I'm stunned by how short sighted this strategy is from Adobe.
So it's "when used in combination" (with Stage3D from my read of it). Here's the page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
In that case it appears to be that you would only need to sign the swf in case you use/need both of these features. If you do use them both without the signed license it will display a watermark on the debug player and disable hardware (switch to software) rendering on the normal player (an only after a certain date).