funanbulle, our #air24h application!
The Adobe 24H Challenge was last friday and the application the 14 teams created are already online. You can see all the available applications on the official website.
Our application is called "funanbulle". The goal of the application is to allow families to create their own micro virtual world and gather. We wanted to show what such virtual worlds would look like. The idea was to enable people to share and chat in real time with a fun and engaging user experience.
funanbulle, Aerys' #air24h challenge contribution
The application is nothing more than a proof of concept. If we had enough time, we would have added lots of feature like:
- Audio chat
- Photos and videos sharing
- Interactive objects to trigger applications (games, sharing applications, etc...)
In the end, we had just enough time to build a 3D chat. But I think it was a lot of fun and it looks really nice! Here is a quick video to show what funanbulle is about and how it works:
This video was made by Michael Chaize to show the 14 applications created during the contest.
#air24h Challenge: First Video!
Here is the very first video (in French) of the Aerys team during the Adobe AIR 24H Challenge that took place last week. The first half of the video was shot only 2 hours after the begining of the contest. The 2nd half was shot only a few hours before the end of the event...
Adobe AIR Challenge : interview equipe AERYS from michael chaize on Vimeo.
Flash 10.1 is out!
You can download it from the Adobe website: http://get.adobe.com/fr/flashplayer/.
Please support Aerys for the Adobe AIR 24H Challenge
That's it! The challenge is on, every challenger knows his opponents... In 8 days, we will unleash Minko and our secret project to conquer the world... or at least the Flash platform!
In the meantime, we need you! YES, YOU! Our team needs supporters, and you can help up by simply clicking on the above picture or here. You will then be asked to log into your Facebook account to show just how much you love us and you want us to win!
Thank you all for your help. I just want you to know we are setting up for a great show!
Pixel shader demo using Flash 10, Pixel Bender and Minko
I'm really excited to announce Minko (which is, by the way, the final name for my 3D library) has reached a new level: pixel shader integration! Pixel shaders are little programs that run on each pixel and can modify their final color. They are often written in C-like languages and in this precise case we use Pixel Bender, the shader language introduced with Flash 10.
In this post I will:
- Explain how any 3D scene is built when using Minko
- Explain how pixel shaders are integrated in the 3D scene
- Explain how pixel shaders are built using Pixel Bender
- Show you a very simple demo of the kind of effects pixel shaders will provide
- Explain how the demo was built
Here are a two screenshots to show the results:
Phong shading + spheric environment mapping on a 2700+ polygons Lamborghini
Phong shading + spheric environment mapping demo
Aerys joins the 24H Adobe AIR Challenge
The 24H Adobe AIR Challenge is a 24 hours long contest that will take place the 18th of June in Paris, France.
During this coding challenge, 15 teams of two people will have to build the best AIR application regarding a precise subject. This very subject will be unveiled as the competition starts.
The challenge will be broadcasted live from http://www.adobeairchallenge.com/.
Aerys is very proud to join the competition and we hope to see you there!
And here are a few useful links (in French) :
Video of the Minko presentation at the TTFX barcamp
Here is a link to my first official presentation of Minko, the 3D library I am working on (and which was previously called "DirectFlex"):
This video was shot the 23rd of March by the people from BAAO. A very big thank you to Yann Chevalier, who's leading the TTFX effort, Michael Chaize, our awesome french Flash platform evangelist and Olivier from BAAO who gave me the link to the video.
You can find the slides here.
Flash 10.1 gets a release date
In reaction to Steve Jobs' latest outrageous declarations, Kevin Lynch himself announced the release date of Flash 10.1 for Android devices:
"We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice."
You can read is full post here : Moving Forward.
From what I'e heard from Adobe so far, Flash 10.1 for the desktop should be released before the Android version. Meaning we can expect Flash 10.1 desktop to be released in May...
Update: In the following Wall Street Journal interview, Shantanu Narayen - Adobe's CEO - also comments Steve Jobs declarations and says Flash 10.1 will be released June 17th (3'10):
Flash 11 drawing API will be hardware accelerated
I love catchy titles. I know nothing about the next major version of Flash and all of this is just speculations.
Anyway, as the whole HTML5 versus Flash battle is raging, it appears Flash relatively poor performances are indeed criticizable at best. Beside poor developers, the Flash Platform suffers from a very very slow software renderer. Or at least much slower than the rest of the platform. It's no secret: hardware acceleration is a key feature for the future of the Flash Player. It's even hard to believe it is not available yet!
As you must already know, Flash 10.1 will support OpenGL ES 2 on mobile devices to leverage the lack of CPU horsepower. While hardware HD video decoding will be available on the desktop too, the drawing API will only be accelerated on mobile devices.
Anyone knowing a bit about OpenGL ES knows it is a subset of OpenGL. Thus if it works with OpenGL ES, it should work with OpenGL. With this in mind, a few questions:
- Why isn't Flash 10.1 drawing API hardware accelerated on any OpenGL capable platform, including the desktop?
- How will it work?
- Will Pixel Bender be hardware accelerated?
1. Hardware Accelerated Desktop Flash Player
Let's face it: there must be an hardware accelerated desktop Flash Player in the works. As I said previously, OpenGL supports all features of OpenGL ES so this is not far fetched at all. Yet, it is neither released nor announced. Why?
My first guess is OpenGL provides with a lot of features that would make the desktop experience a lot smoother than just using what offers its little brother OpenGL ES. So at some point Adobe had to make a choice :
- release a fully hardware accelerated Flash 10.1 on both mobile and desktop platforms, with the last one being very far from what desktop hardware is actually capable to handle
- or release Flash 10.1 focusing on mobile devices and announce hardware acceleration for the desktop just after its the final release... and I'm guessing it might be a key feature of Flash 11
When I was at the French Flash User Group (TTFX - les TonTons FleXeurs) a few months ago, I spoke with Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers about the just announced microphone raw-data access. I asked them why it was announced only for AIR 2.0 and not Flash 10.1. The answer was something about the "quality guys" making sure the feature was well suited on both the roadmap and the logic of the incoming updates. And this feature eventually made its way into the Flash Player! I think that's what is happening with hardware acceleration on the desktop.
But if you don't believe me, you don't have to take my word for it! What about Adobe's word? Cnuuja, one of the engineer working on the Flash Player, posted this very message on the Flash 10.1 Forum:
Can OpenGL 3.3/4.0 improve Flash 10.x ?
"Yes.... with a lot of work. We have spent the last year writing new code which allows OpenGLES2 to render flash content on mobile devices. Performance varies significantly from one gpu to the next, with some gpus being slower than the software renderer. What Flash does is significantly different from the 3d triangles+shaders GPUs were designed to support. Its a lot of work to make OGL/D3D usable as our renderer, but we're working on it 
-chris"
2. How will it work?
Just like in Flash 10.1 for mobile devices. But much faster thanks to OpenGL and Direct3D.
The internals of such feature is very important: developers must know and understand how it works to make the best out of it. Adobe already talked about how the drawing API is accelerated in Flash 10.1 on mobile devices:
"When a GPU renders vector graphics, it breaks them up into meshes made of small triangles before drawing them, a process called tesselating. There is a small cost to doing this, which increases as the complexity of the shape increases. To minimize performance impact, avoid morph shapes, which must be retesselated on every frame."
It's straight forward and I think it's actually the best (and only...) way to do it. Tesselation will create triangles by computing sets of vertices/indices (also called Vertex and Index Buffers) and push them to the graphics hardware. The end of the quote suggests such data is cached and should not be recomputed if no redraw occurs.
Something very important though: z-sorting. People might think hardware acceleration implies z-sorting. But it doesn't. When you know how 3D hardware and APIs work, you know it will be very tricky to make it work with something as general purpose as Flash. If Adobe wants to use the z-buffer, they will have to cut the compatibility with the software renderer. And I don't think this will happen anytime soon.
3. Hardware Accelerated Pixel Bender
Pixel Bender is already hardware accelerated pretty much everywhere except the Flash Platform. I'm not sure why. Still, it's hardware accelerated in other products of the Creative Suite so I guess that an OpenGL/Direct3D shader languages compliant intermediate represenation of Pixel Bender kernels does exist.
This said, it's just a matter of how to make it work with the very general purpose Flash Player. Considering Flash 10.1 is using tesselation, my guess is pixel shader should follow quite easily.