Switching to Flash 10

From Red Blob Games's Blog

On this blog you can see some of the experiments I've been playing with. In 2004, I started looking at Flash, mostly because I'd be able to share my experiments on the web. But at the time, Flash wasn't as free or accessible, and I switched to Java. Dissatisfied with Java, I took a look at Flash again, and started writing Flash 8 code. Two years ago I switched from Flash 8 to Flash 9. Flash 9's language (Actionscript 3) is much nicer than Flash 8's language (Actionscript 2). It's a modern programming language, with classes, objects, closures, recursion, XML, JSON, etc., and was tracking ECMAscript until the Javascript folk changed direction. Flash 9's graphics libraries are nicer than Flash 8's. It supports a tree of layers, each with its own rotation, scaling, alpha transparency, shadows, and other effects.

Flash 10 uses the same language as Flash 9. Its libraries have lots more features, especially in the graphics system. There's now a low-level graphics API that offers partial 3D, higher performance, and pixel shaders. I was slow to move to Flash 9 in part because the adoption of Flash 9 was slow. It looks like Flash now has auto-updating, and Flash 10 is being installed much more widely. I'm switching all my current projects to Flash 10.

For Flash 10 I'm using the free Flex 3.3 SDK and the Flex 3.3 docs (online or download). The SDK comes with a command line compiler, mxmlc, that I run with mxmlc -target-player 10 on the “main” program, and that will also compile anything else that is used by the main class. If you want a tutorial for using mxmlc, see senoular's mxmlc beginner guide.

Flex also comes with a compilation shell, fcsh, that lets you keep the compiler in memory to avoid the 2 seconds to start it up every time you want to recompile. I wrote a wrapper around this so that whenever I save something in Emacs, it automatically recompiles. That way, my development cycle is: edit, save, and reload in the browser. It's quite nice to have a fast cycle.

I haven't played much with the Flash 10 library additions, but the first thing I used was the bitmap line support. I'm using it to draw dashed lines as striped lane dividers. I plan to read about the new library features, but not try them until I find a possible use for them in my projects.

Update: [2012-02] [2010-03] Flex 4 is out, and includes updated documentation, and downloadable documentation. Like Flex 3, it targets Flash 10 but can also be used for earlier versions of Flash.

Update: [2013-04] This seems to be the new command line Actionscript compiler, for Flash 11 / Stage3D / AIR.

Labels: flash , programming