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Adobe Introduces Premium Features for Gaming with Flash Player 11.2

20 points by DanielRibeiro 15y ago

chargrilled 15y ago
9% of gross revenues to be able to use hardware accelerated 3D and fast memory access? 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.
- barrettcolin 15y ago
  I see this new note on the Adobe Alchemy labs page: "Domain memory (used by Alchemy) and Stage3D hardware acceleration – when used in combination – will be part of a premium tier of capabilities for gaming in Flash Player, enabling a new generation of immersive online games." So it's "when used in combination" (with Stage3D from my read of it). Here's the page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
- jamesu 15y ago
  The latest Flash uses signing to permit access to these fast memory opcodes, see http://asvguy.com/2012/03/why-will-premium-flash-player-features-kill-flash.html http://asvguy.com/2012/03/why-will-premium-flash-player-feat...
  - Haplo 15y ago
    Are you sure this is the case? From the Adobe article it seems that after a certain date they will disable hardware rendering for flash games that use both domainMemory and stage3D. 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).
- Maxious 15y ago
  We're going to be annihilated compared to HTML5 but we're going to use our IP to squeeze every last cent of you on the way out? ;)
  - nixle 15y ago
    More like: we need more money to compete with in this billion dollar market where we are generating suprisingly little revenue.
reitzensteinm 15y ago
Adobe is slaughtering the goose because it knows the golden eggs will be worthless in a few short years. I'm only surprised that they are doing it so blatantly. 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.
- html5iscancer 15y ago
  I feel you on the hate for Flash, but HTML5 is only marginally less stupid. Javascript as the bottom layer of a platform? Give me a break. And a bloated pile of standards is worse than a simple proprietary tool (which unfortunately, Flash is not).
- Skrekkpus 15y ago
  You think html5 is going to compete with flash/unity on 3d gaming??? Haha, you're cute!
- nixle 15y ago
  I too hate the hundreds of well known bugs that I constantly run into. I hate it! Oh wait, no that just trolling BS. <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
  - fruchtose 15y ago
    >I too hate the hundreds of well known bugs that I constantly run into. I hate it! Oh wait, no that just trolling BS. 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.
nextparadigms 15y ago
Canvas 2D obviously can't compete with this, but what about WebGL? Does WebGL beat Flash in graphics quality/unit of performance? I'm not sure it can. I believe NaCl can do it, though.
- Skrekkpus 15y ago
  There have been a few performance tests and they indicate that it is very even. WebGL still has no chance in my opinion because there are no good development tools (compare that to unity3D), also WebGL apparently has the biggest security issues of all plugins at the moment because it allows web apps full access to graphics memory and graphics drivers.
nixle 15y ago
You only need a license if you use BOTH stage3D and Alchemy. Alchemy allowes c++ code to be executed from Flash on any platform. This has nothing to with Flash so I think it is only fair that we pay them for their investment. All the rest is still free.
9999 15y ago
"Starting August 1, these features will be licensed for commercial use, and there is no charge for the first $50K in application revenues. The use of premium features within Adobe AIR, including for mobile applications for iOS and Android, will be royalty free." 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.
- quink 15y ago
  > Now adobe wants 9% of your remaining revenue? For what, exactly? 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%.
  - 9999 15y ago
    That's the hilarious part about this. You probably won't need CS5.5, or any adobe product other than alchemy. You will compile straight from unity or udk or whoever else they drag onto their sinking ship. As a guy that writes a lot of actionscript, I can tell you that adobe stopped selling the best tools for making swfs long, long ago. Jobs was right about that one, adobe needs to return to making tools and selling them (although I still have some hope that he was wrong about the runtime ). The greedy imbecile at Adobe that looked at udk's licensing terms and thought they could pull similar royalties off of a cross compiler should be tarred, feathered, and booted out of the organization.
zack12 15y ago
As far as i know (with my limited knowledge, of course) HTML5 is not going to be able to compete with flash in game development anytime soon. Although BrowserQuest was really fascinating. For guys like me, who are beginners, do you think it is a good time to invest in learning flash/flex/actionscript for mobile game development or is there something better?
- Skrekkpus 15y ago
  there is something better, Unity3D. It's available for free so you can start developing, but then you get locked in of course and eventually that means paying for premium features if you want your game to shine.
salmanapk 15y ago
And still no ing promised WebM support.
salmanapk 15y ago
And still no ####ing promised WebM support.

20 points by DanielRibeiro 15y ago

9% of gross revenues to be able to use hardware accelerated 3D and fast memory access? 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.

barrettcolin 15y ago
I see this new note on the Adobe Alchemy labs page: "Domain memory (used by Alchemy) and Stage3D hardware acceleration – when used in combination – will be part of a premium tier of capabilities for gaming in Flash Player, enabling a new generation of immersive online games." So it's "when used in combination" (with Stage3D from my read of it). Here's the page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
jamesu 15y ago
The latest Flash uses signing to permit access to these fast memory opcodes, see http://asvguy.com/2012/03/why-will-premium-flash-player-features-kill-flash.html http://asvguy.com/2012/03/why-will-premium-flash-player-feat...
- Haplo 15y ago
  Are you sure this is the case? From the Adobe article it seems that after a certain date they will disable hardware rendering for flash games that use both domainMemory and stage3D. 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).
Maxious 15y ago
We're going to be annihilated compared to HTML5 but we're going to use our IP to squeeze every last cent of you on the way out? ;)
- nixle 15y ago
  More like: we need more money to compete with in this billion dollar market where we are generating suprisingly little revenue.

reitzensteinm 15y ago

Adobe is slaughtering the goose because it knows the golden eggs will be worthless in a few short years. I'm only surprised that they are doing it so blatantly. 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.

html5iscancer 15y ago
I feel you on the hate for Flash, but HTML5 is only marginally less stupid. Javascript as the bottom layer of a platform? Give me a break. And a bloated pile of standards is worse than a simple proprietary tool (which unfortunately, Flash is not).
Skrekkpus 15y ago
You think html5 is going to compete with flash/unity on 3d gaming??? Haha, you're cute!
nixle 15y ago
I too hate the hundreds of well known bugs that I constantly run into. I hate it! Oh wait, no that just trolling BS. <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
- fruchtose 15y ago
  >I too hate the hundreds of well known bugs that I constantly run into. I hate it! Oh wait, no that just trolling BS. 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.

nextparadigms 15y ago

Canvas 2D obviously can't compete with this, but what about WebGL? Does WebGL beat Flash in graphics quality/unit of performance? I'm not sure it can. I believe NaCl can do it, though.

Skrekkpus 15y ago
There have been a few performance tests and they indicate that it is very even. WebGL still has no chance in my opinion because there are no good development tools (compare that to unity3D), also WebGL apparently has the biggest security issues of all plugins at the moment because it allows web apps full access to graphics memory and graphics drivers.

nixle 15y ago

You only need a license if you use BOTH stage3D and Alchemy. Alchemy allowes c++ code to be executed from Flash on any platform. This has nothing to with Flash so I think it is only fair that we pay them for their investment. All the rest is still free.

9999 15y ago

"Starting August 1, these features will be licensed for commercial use, and there is no charge for the first $50K in application revenues. The use of premium features within Adobe AIR, including for mobile applications for iOS and Android, will be royalty free." 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.

quink 15y ago
> Now adobe wants 9% of your remaining revenue? For what, exactly? 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%.
- 9999 15y ago
  That's the hilarious part about this. You probably won't need CS5.5, or any adobe product other than alchemy. You will compile straight from unity or udk or whoever else they drag onto their sinking ship. As a guy that writes a lot of actionscript, I can tell you that adobe stopped selling the best tools for making swfs long, long ago. Jobs was right about that one, adobe needs to return to making tools and selling them (although I still have some hope that he was wrong about the runtime ). The greedy imbecile at Adobe that looked at udk's licensing terms and thought they could pull similar royalties off of a cross compiler should be tarred, feathered, and booted out of the organization.

zack12 15y ago

As far as i know (with my limited knowledge, of course) HTML5 is not going to be able to compete with flash in game development anytime soon. Although BrowserQuest was really fascinating. For guys like me, who are beginners, do you think it is a good time to invest in learning flash/flex/actionscript for mobile game development or is there something better?

Skrekkpus 15y ago
there is something better, Unity3D. It's available for free so you can start developing, but then you get locked in of course and eventually that means paying for premium features if you want your game to shine.

salmanapk 15y ago

And still no ing promised WebM support.

salmanapk 15y ago

And still no ####ing promised WebM support.