On Nov 2, 2007, at 12:30 PM, Aldo Bucchi wrote:
It is THE biggest thing I have seen so far related to the flash
player.
It's cool, no doubt.
There are questionable elements to that demonstration. Although it
was primarily running in the Player, it's likely that the actual
rendering was done using low-level within a modified version of the
Player. An interpreted language is just not fast enough, and there is
no way the current Player version couldn't approach a 30fps playback
speed with the graphics of Quake.
Something has to give somewhere. Details are not plentiful enough to
fully evaluate the approach.
- is this real?
To some extent, it sure is. Pre-processing C into other languages has
been around a long time. This is the first time a lot of people have
seen this approach because they don't come from a traditional
software dev. background.
- when should we expect this to hit the street, if ever ( we need to
get prepared ya know... )
It's R&D tech. I don't think this is to be expected anytime soon, but
I could be wrong about that.
- hmm what happens with licenses... can we just port EVERY open source
c/cpp interpreter, codec, lib, etc to as3?
Licenses? This is kinda moot. It's the possibility of porting C to
AS3, not whether or not it's legal. Could you port over mp3 codecs?
Sure you probably could, but you'd have to pay dearly.
damn. this is one of those things that make me question everything
about everything. It just changes the rules of the game completely. It
is too good to be true, and at the same time too bad... i'm confused.
Remove the coolness factor for one moment of being able to see Quake
run in the Flash Player. Then wonder how modified that Player version
was...
Quake is available open source. Why in the world would you want to
put it in AS3 – aside from absolute coolness factor? We have to
remember target audiences here.
Gamers expect cool ass graphics and high framerates. Even with
hardware acceleration, you can't fine tune memory management and eek
out as many CPU cycles as you can to get the best playback. Try
getting the PhysX libraries to run at a decent rate in an interpreted
language....
To me, it means more libraries are available for use to AS3 (or 4)
developers. Those libraries are already there and we can already use
them. We just have to port it by hand. Just like the PNG and JPG
encoder were ported by Tinic. Took a bit of thinking I'm sure, but it
works.
The absolutely cool factor is the amazing speed at which they
demonstrated code being ported over, questions about implementation
notwithstanding.
The technology is highly cool, no doubt. I'd just keep focus on what
it really means at this present time - a faster way to get more code
into Flash.
Heck, I'm excited because I might be able to resurrect some pretty
complex projects – complex for me, 8 or so years ago – that were
built in Codewarrior. :)
cheers,
jon
