Comments on: What new game APIs do you want in the Flash Player?

By: esmin

esmin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:55:14 +0000

It would be REALLY nice to have following features in Flash:

- Detect from within Flash is fullScreen allowed (this can be workaround-ed with try – catch)
- Control(disable!) browser scrolling on mouseWheel (when mouse is over flash) event from flash, so we can use these events more often
- Native collision detection (not only for bounds)
- simpler pixel bender integration

By: UnknownGuardian

UnknownGuardian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:08:29 +0000

Right Click event listener!
A SMALL run-time compiler(allows a user to input basic commands into a textfield and it runs them!)

When running through the Display list, also skip over alpha=0 values in addition to the visible = 0 clips.

By: Lee Comstock

Lee Comstock — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:52:34 +0000

First off, I’m very glad you’re looking at improving game development in Flash! The whole iPhone thing is very appreciated as well!

1. If you have a bunch of blue balls and a bunch of red balls I’d like to be able to say “if a blue ball hits a red ball this happens”, but that’s sorta difficult when you have to use instance names and pathways.

2. I’d like the built in 3D to take care of the stacking order for me, instead of expecting me to be a super genius at coding.

I would REALLY like that first one you suggested also, having two movieclips hitTest with full accuracy.

There you go, and thanks for reading. :)

By: cameron

cameron — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:23:45 +0000

For Adobe Flash to forever silence the gaming platform competition it need only include 3 things

1) multithreading
2) memory management
3) A sweet gaming-specific IDE. Better than Director. Like Unity.

WRITE THESE ON ALL THE WALLS IN THE SAN JOSE HQ!!!!!!

By: Andre Spierings

Andre Spierings — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:49:59 +0000

hardware accelerated drawTriangles and drawGraphicsData

better memory profiling

faster build times for large projects and better ways to manage assets.

automatic imports of classes when loading swfs.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:31:24 +0000

AS3 needs native support for physical units in the Number class. e.g.

“55 miles per hour” * “3 seconds” = “74 feet”.

This is helpful for any kind of simulation. Checking units is a great way to catch math errors.

It would be fairly easy to add, and open-source examples exist:

For Python, there’s the “magnitude” library,
Ruby has “Stick”, and
Java has “unit”.

Magnitude seems to have a good paradigm.

By: Sean Cooper

Sean Cooper — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:25:37 +0000

Code Editing:
The Flash code editor way been that of its rivals and most coders use other code editors. When I download Visual Basic it comes with everything, autocompletion especially. Why is Flash still a toy and not a real professional tool for coders?

Memory Management:
It is incredibly hard to keep track of memory and thus things get left in memory and you have no idea what is going on. BitmapData.dispose which releases the BitmapData memory is greta example of what we need for all items. When I have finished with a MovieClip I want to kill it completely and remove all memory it has allocated even if there are events left on it.

Audio mananement:
Audio layers allowing different layers of sound and thus control. If the structure was Layer->Channel->Sound then you could apply more control i.e. stop layer. Also an audio pause and resume, most games need to pause at some point and thus need to pause the audio.

Keyboard management:
The keyboard is a biggy, I have a very large API to handle keypresses, from storing different states on every key, i.e. Released, Pressed, Down, Flags (Shift/Control/Alt). e.g. the Release flag can be tested at any time after the event occured. Keypresses in games are not usually trapped on an event but when the process of the game happens I would like to see a key test, i.e. if (KeyPressed(“A”)) { do something; ClearKey(); }

Geometry:
Line intersections, Circle intersection, Point to line – etc.
Classes for all shape primitives, Line, Circle, Rectangle ( this is there in part)

Collision:
Bitmap to Bitmap collision – line to bitmap etc. MovieClip to MovieClip collision. How do these in intersect? etc. It is all possible but it is incredibly slow.

Flash has one big disadvantage over other programming tools in that it is slow and there is a reason for that. So the APIs need to be more extensive in order to retain speed. Shadez 2 has to really get rid of the way I used to think of Flash, no movieclips, no hit tests as they bring it to its knees, no class allocation (i.e Point) way too slow, precompiled tables for Sin/Cos again way too slow, Sqrt slow, no Number to int conversions slow… all of these functions should not be as slow as they are.

I think the big one is the environment, it reminds of coding in the 80’s.

Other than that I love writing games in Flash, it just a shame that such things are are non-existant.

Sean Cooper
http://twitter.com/seantcooper

By: oos

oos — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:01:53 +0000

I agree with a lot of what Tom is saying here above.

Also, bring back the fun in making games with flash.

I haven´t made a single game “just for fun” since as3 was introduced. The reason? Cause it´s NOT fun anymore… for obvious reasons…

By: tomsamson

tomsamson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:05:36 +0000

-What about being able to control nested movieclips before they throw an event in AS3 as it was possible since flash 4 or 5?
-What about being able to load and unload and control swfs without having to worry about them not getting propperly removed from memory as it is the case now with your sucky Java copy Garbage Collector? (You should generally stop copying each and everything from Java without thinking about usability propperly; hooray, we cloned the GC to avoid circular references problem but in return apps now run way more regularly into memory leakage issues, wicked)
-i understand that with a plugin technology you´re worried about any security concern that is brought up, but seriously, its no good idea at all to limit cross domain asset loading and handling to the degree you did with the security sandbox updates in the past few years, meanwhile without workarounds flash is more limited in loading and handling media cross domains than a html 1 gen browser
(awesome, i can use draw on a bitmap without restrictions when i set up policy files and proxy type stuff)
-What about propper compiled swfs that aren´t that easily decompiled?
-What about propper 3d api stuff that doesn´t use cheap tricks like the stuff you introduced now which turns the things into sorta jaggy bitmaps?
-What about propper hardware acceleration for all graphical operations so the content runs in acceptable performance compared to most other technologies out there on a mediocre system?
-What about supporting all newer api features in AS1 and 2,too, not just AS3?
-What about compiling AS1, 2 and 3 down to machine closer code so they all can run in same higher than now performance?
-What about the option of writing #pragma strict in an AS1/ 2 AS file so one can enable type checking just for that file
(last few would ease in people getting into AS3 and also allow people to use flash who just plain aren´t into using your java copy AS3 as otherwise, you know, they could aswell use java or other things that perform way better than flash anyway).

You guys let the community wait for ages for the propper things they ask for like some of these mentioned here and then come out with crappy 3d functionality when the community has already done papervision and away 3d or now crappy collision detection features when the community has again already moved on and ported box2D or you come up with pseudo hardware acceleration which is a joke when the community is already moving on to use unity3d.
When will you guys wake up and stop swallowing your own hype is reality pills?

By: Pericius

Pericius — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:56:33 +0000

Though it’s not an API request, I should note that Flash, to reach next level of gaming, needs mouse cursor exclusivity option.
I’m aware of many reasons of why there is none now, but something like a Flash Player pop-up asking to enable that by user permission would imho be a good compromise.
If Flash games are heading 3D, there oughta be support for this.
I mean, FPS or space sim with having to hold left mouse button all the time? Bloody carpal…