In November of last year, Adobe finally bit down on the bitter pill and killed its Flash development efforts on mobile devices. Today, the company has released a new roadmap for Flash development, promising a renewed focus on Flash development for browser gaming. With competition coming from Google in the form of the Google Native Client, Flash needs to do what it can to keep developers on its side.
“Adobe is fully focused on creating a robust business around gaming,” the document reads. “Games continuously push the technological barriers, and the Flash runtimes allow Adobe to deliver the new capabilities demanded by games faster than virtually any other technology, while providing the widest reach and audience.”
Adobe has promised a “formalized game developer program” and more support to allow developers to use C & C++ code and libraries on Flash-based titles. Some game development features for Flash will be launching in Flash Player 11.2 during the current quarter. Those features include:
- Mouse-lock support
- Right and middle mouse-click support
- Context menu disabling
- Hardware-accelerated graphics/Stage 3D support for Apple iOS and Android via Adobe AIR
- Support for more hardware accelerated video cards (from January 2008) in order to expand availability of hardware-accelerated content.
- New Throttle event API (dispatches event when Flash Player throttles, pauses, or resumes content)
- Multithreaded video decoding pipeline on the desktop which improves overall performance of video on all desktop platform
Follow-on features will be a part of later builds, code-named Cyril and Doleres. Cyril is planned for a released in the second quarter of 2012, and Dolores is planned for the second half of 2012. Some of these features include:
- Keyboard input support in full-screen mode
- Support for advanced profiling
- Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of hardware accelerated content
Further development is planned for the “next” versions of Flash Player and ActionScript. More information on future Flash development can be found at the roadmap document linked above.
[Via The Verge]
