5 ms·

This is what Flash can do in 2008

27 points by est 17y ago

lenni 17y ago
This sure is impressing, but nobody said Flash doesn't have some good features. The question is about whether anybody who wants to can implement a player for this page.
- est 17y ago
  http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2008/04/bunker.swf http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2008/04/bunker.... and http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2009/02/hero.swf http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2009/02/hero.sw... (press space to rotate)
  - swombat 17y ago
    The hero example is a lot better than the one you posted.
  - drKarl 17y ago
    With HTML5 http://www.benjoffe.com/code/demos/canvascape/textures http://www.benjoffe.com/code/demos/canvascape/textures
    - jm4 17y ago
      Neat. This example is nowhere near as pretty as the Flash examples, but it's interesting that my CPU is barely doing anything even when walking around. In the Flash version my CPU is pegged just sitting there doing nothing.
      - est 17y ago
        I am pretty sure if HTML5 implement the same scene as bunker.swf it would hog much much more CPU. http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/ http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/ Try set the font to 100, and see if it's still as smooth as you thought.
        not_an_alien 17y ago
        Canvas is by all means a CPU hog and much slower than software-mode Flash. http://vimeo.com/10553088 http://vimeo.com/10553088 But hey, Flash is dying, etc
        Shorel 17y ago
        Flash Games, demos, and webcomics are nice. However: No matter the codec or operating system, we should not NEED Flash to view video on the Web.
        est 17y ago
        i completely agree however, suppose you are about to design a video site for the common public back in 2005, what technology would you choose? quicktime? realplayer? windows media player? i dont think flash video is unneeded any soon, even if html5 has a 70% adoption rate, people would still need flash for h.264 fallback
        Shorel 17y ago
        150 in Opera runs smooth
    - BillGoatse 17y ago
      http://www.kongregate.com/games/mike_id/doom-1 http://www.kongregate.com/games/mike_id/doom-1 Wolfenstein, meet Doom. I'd say the bunker example above is pushing Quake 2 levels. I agree that Adobe have dropped the ball with Flash, but "HTML 5" is no where near where it should be...
- raimondious 17y ago
  The SWF specification is published. Anyone who wants to can http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx. You can also create a compiler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTASC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTASC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWFTools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWFTools.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
pieter 17y ago
Not respecting dvorak keyboard layout, even in 2008?
- entitlement 17y ago
  Lack of universal acceptance was one of the cons you either accepted, or naively overlooked, back when you decided dvorak was the way to go. It'd be nice to see it work in more places, sure, but it just ain't... you're conflating 'should' and 'could'.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Groxx 17y ago
    The issue with ignoring dvorak is that any web browser (heck, nearly any application) will handle it just fine. Flash apparently doesn't, or makes doing simple things (like capturing +/- keystrokes) hard enough that people don't do them in a generic way. Given that Flash is primarily used in the web browser, and most of the world doesn't use QWERTY, it's rather shameful. A quick test on my end shows that the Flash example indeed does not respect dvorak, while a Javascript key event captures the same code regardless of layout. Including Japanese. How's Flash handle that?
  - weavejester 17y ago
    Alternative keyboard layouts work for pretty much everything. Almost all applications rely on the OS to translate key mappings, so there's virtually no incompatibility to worry about. I don't think I've ever come across an application that didn't work just as well in Dvorak as Qwerty.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    A snarky Apple fan could respond in the same way with regard to the absence of Flash on the iPhone products.
    - logic 17y ago
hackermom 17y ago
It's just plain displacement mapping. It's a very simple (and old), but versatile technique allowing a large amount of effects to be done. The first time I saw this was in 93 or 94, rendered in real time in 256*256 in 25 fps, on an Amiga running a 14mhz 68020 processor. THAT was impressive to me, but seeing this 15 years later in 15-20 fps in Flash on a 2ghz machine just isn't.
- swombat 17y ago
  Agreed - Also worth looking at the other examples est posted lower in the discussion. Those are more interesting.
- dca 17y ago
  Exactly. And flash was introduced 14 years ago. It really has no excuse for not having better performance at this point. I'm glad its dying.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    Of course the real difference is a lot higher as it's not just about the clock rate - an awful lot of improvements were made in areas such as the pipeline, caching, floating-point support etc. so I wouldn't be very surprised if the real performance ratio was higher than 1000.
    - ToastOpt 17y ago
      Floating point ops used to take a while. A 16Mhz Amiga with a floating point co-processor might have had one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881 Yeah, 16 Mhz ==> 160 KFlops, if you believe wikipedia. Supposedly the i7 has a peak of 79 GFlops. Sure, you can't get all of that performance out (either then, or now), but 79,000,000 / 160 is a bit larger than 143. You used to measure the number of cycles an integer multiply costed, in the dozens or hundreds. Now it takes 1/4 of a cycle. A factor of 10,000 might be a fairer number
mhd 17y ago
I am not an atomic playboy!
- jleard 17y ago
  And that was 1993. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8#t=4m40s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8#t=4m40s
baskinghobo 17y ago
I remember something exactly like this except it was an Asian lady and it looked like a real photo. Also instead of looking away from the cursor her eyes were following the cursor.
bd 17y ago
Here is a very similar effect in canvas: http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-canvas-tag http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-c...
- winter_blue 17y ago
  It's so slow.. According to hackermom the 14Mhz Amiga could do this at 25 fps, any idea why this is so slow on modern computers?
  - MichaelGG 17y ago
    It's not slow on modern computers. It's slow on these environments that weren't made to execute code quickly, much less do any pixel manipulation. How many orders of magnitude more instructions is it to set a pixel on an Amiga, versus setting it via JavaScript?
  - efsavage 17y ago
    Because it's running in canvas? In other words, it's running within abstraction layer upon abstraction layer, with various other abstraction layers involved to help make sense of the fact that there are too many abstraction layers. The amiga code was probably pretty close to talking to the graphics driver directly. Canvas is cool, but in terms of performance it's never really going to compete with native code, or even with flash for that matter since flash can remove some complexity by only building for a single, predictable, optimized environment.
    - est 17y ago
      That's why everyone is embracing GPU powered graphics.
    - raganwald 17y ago
      > it's running within abstraction layer upon abstraction layer, with various other abstraction layers involved to help make sense of the fact that there are too many abstraction layers. "Every problem can be solved by adding another layer of abstraction--Except for the problem of having too many layers of abstraction"--Alan Perlis
davidedicillo 17y ago
And how would this improve the web experience? (considering you can do similar stuff with canvas as well...)
teamonkey 17y ago
A bit of context: this is a demo showing parallax mapping, which was a soon-to-be-released feature of the Flash-based Alternativia engine at the time. It's was never supposed to be a state-of-the-art demonstration of Flash. http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/01/04/character-parallax/ http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/01/04/character-...
owengot 17y ago
One word: Indeed.. http://twitpic.com/1l9b7k http://twitpic.com/1l9b7k

27 points by est 17y ago

lenni 17y ago

This sure is impressing, but nobody said Flash doesn't have some good features. The question is about whether anybody who wants to can implement a player for this page.

est 17y ago
http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2008/04/bunker.swf http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2008/04/bunker.... and http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2009/02/hero.swf http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2009/02/hero.sw... (press space to rotate)
- swombat 17y ago
  The hero example is a lot better than the one you posted.
- drKarl 17y ago
  With HTML5 http://www.benjoffe.com/code/demos/canvascape/textures http://www.benjoffe.com/code/demos/canvascape/textures
  - jm4 17y ago
    Neat. This example is nowhere near as pretty as the Flash examples, but it's interesting that my CPU is barely doing anything even when walking around. In the Flash version my CPU is pegged just sitting there doing nothing.
    - est 17y ago
      I am pretty sure if HTML5 implement the same scene as bunker.swf it would hog much much more CPU. http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/ http://www.ponticstar.com/projects/burning-words/ Try set the font to 100, and see if it's still as smooth as you thought.
      - not_an_alien 17y ago
        Canvas is by all means a CPU hog and much slower than software-mode Flash. http://vimeo.com/10553088 http://vimeo.com/10553088 But hey, Flash is dying, etc
        Shorel 17y ago
        Flash Games, demos, and webcomics are nice. However: No matter the codec or operating system, we should not NEED Flash to view video on the Web.
        est 17y ago
        i completely agree however, suppose you are about to design a video site for the common public back in 2005, what technology would you choose? quicktime? realplayer? windows media player? i dont think flash video is unneeded any soon, even if html5 has a 70% adoption rate, people would still need flash for h.264 fallback
      - Shorel 17y ago
        150 in Opera runs smooth
  - BillGoatse 17y ago
    http://www.kongregate.com/games/mike_id/doom-1 http://www.kongregate.com/games/mike_id/doom-1 Wolfenstein, meet Doom. I'd say the bunker example above is pushing Quake 2 levels. I agree that Adobe have dropped the ball with Flash, but "HTML 5" is no where near where it should be...
raimondious 17y ago
The SWF specification is published. Anyone who wants to can http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx. You can also create a compiler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTASC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTASC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWFTools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWFTools.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

pieter 17y ago

Not respecting dvorak keyboard layout, even in 2008?

entitlement 17y ago
Lack of universal acceptance was one of the cons you either accepted, or naively overlooked, back when you decided dvorak was the way to go. It'd be nice to see it work in more places, sure, but it just ain't... you're conflating 'should' and 'could'.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Groxx 17y ago
  The issue with ignoring dvorak is that any web browser (heck, nearly any application) will handle it just fine. Flash apparently doesn't, or makes doing simple things (like capturing +/- keystrokes) hard enough that people don't do them in a generic way. Given that Flash is primarily used in the web browser, and most of the world doesn't use QWERTY, it's rather shameful. A quick test on my end shows that the Flash example indeed does not respect dvorak, while a Javascript key event captures the same code regardless of layout. Including Japanese. How's Flash handle that?
- weavejester 17y ago
  Alternative keyboard layouts work for pretty much everything. Almost all applications rely on the OS to translate key mappings, so there's virtually no incompatibility to worry about. I don't think I've ever come across an application that didn't work just as well in Dvorak as Qwerty.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  A snarky Apple fan could respond in the same way with regard to the absence of Flash on the iPhone products.
  - logic 17y ago

hackermom 17y ago

It's just plain displacement mapping. It's a very simple (and old), but versatile technique allowing a large amount of effects to be done. The first time I saw this was in 93 or 94, rendered in real time in 256*256 in 25 fps, on an Amiga running a 14mhz 68020 processor. THAT was impressive to me, but seeing this 15 years later in 15-20 fps in Flash on a 2ghz machine just isn't.

swombat 17y ago
Agreed - Also worth looking at the other examples est posted lower in the discussion. Those are more interesting.
dca 17y ago
Exactly. And flash was introduced 14 years ago. It really has no excuse for not having better performance at this point. I'm glad its dying.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  Of course the real difference is a lot higher as it's not just about the clock rate - an awful lot of improvements were made in areas such as the pipeline, caching, floating-point support etc. so I wouldn't be very surprised if the real performance ratio was higher than 1000.
  - ToastOpt 17y ago
    Floating point ops used to take a while. A 16Mhz Amiga with a floating point co-processor might have had one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881 Yeah, 16 Mhz ==> 160 KFlops, if you believe wikipedia. Supposedly the i7 has a peak of 79 GFlops. Sure, you can't get all of that performance out (either then, or now), but 79,000,000 / 160 is a bit larger than 143. You used to measure the number of cycles an integer multiply costed, in the dozens or hundreds. Now it takes 1/4 of a cycle. A factor of 10,000 might be a fairer number

mhd 17y ago

I am not an atomic playboy!

jleard 17y ago
And that was 1993. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8#t=4m40s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8#t=4m40s

baskinghobo 17y ago

I remember something exactly like this except it was an Asian lady and it looked like a real photo. Also instead of looking away from the cursor her eyes were following the cursor.

bd 17y ago

Here is a very similar effect in canvas: http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-canvas-tag http://29a.ch/2010/3/24/normal-mapping-with-javascript-and-c...

winter_blue 17y ago
It's so slow.. According to hackermom the 14Mhz Amiga could do this at 25 fps, any idea why this is so slow on modern computers?
- MichaelGG 17y ago
  It's not slow on modern computers. It's slow on these environments that weren't made to execute code quickly, much less do any pixel manipulation. How many orders of magnitude more instructions is it to set a pixel on an Amiga, versus setting it via JavaScript?
- efsavage 17y ago
  Because it's running in canvas? In other words, it's running within abstraction layer upon abstraction layer, with various other abstraction layers involved to help make sense of the fact that there are too many abstraction layers. The amiga code was probably pretty close to talking to the graphics driver directly. Canvas is cool, but in terms of performance it's never really going to compete with native code, or even with flash for that matter since flash can remove some complexity by only building for a single, predictable, optimized environment.
  - est 17y ago
    That's why everyone is embracing GPU powered graphics.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    > it's running within abstraction layer upon abstraction layer, with various other abstraction layers involved to help make sense of the fact that there are too many abstraction layers. "Every problem can be solved by adding another layer of abstraction--Except for the problem of having too many layers of abstraction"--Alan Perlis

davidedicillo 17y ago

And how would this improve the web experience? (considering you can do similar stuff with canvas as well...)

teamonkey 17y ago

A bit of context: this is a demo showing parallax mapping, which was a soon-to-be-released feature of the Flash-based Alternativia engine at the time. It's was never supposed to be a state-of-the-art demonstration of Flash. http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/01/04/character-parallax/ http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2008/01/04/character-...

owengot 17y ago

One word: Indeed.. http://twitpic.com/1l9b7k http://twitpic.com/1l9b7k