As previously announced, Unity projects will be publishable to Flash via Stage3D (FP11). Before long, Unity projects will run in browsers with FlashPlayer11 installed. The Unity team says it is bringing as many Unity features into Flash as possible, with the goal of making Unity the best tool for building 3D functionality for Flash Player. On the 27th of this month, Unity will hold a Flash Tech Day, which will get Flash developers up to speed on moving to Unity development, show and introduce the features Unity supports in the Flash environment, and provide a beginner-level overview. For some of the latest news, check out this introductory article: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/. I’m not all that interested in Unity’s own features, but one item — that programs running inside FP can talk to AS code both inside and outside a Unity project — is great news as far as I’m concerned.

To be honest, my recent project has been getting more and more boring. The core stuff is basically done, and almost everything left is grunt work — nothing new or fun. Yesterday I finished The Settlers 7, was just about to drift off to sleep, and then suddenly came across two pages that perked me right up: [http://www.buraks.com/azoth/](http://www.buraks.com/azoth/) and [http://philippe.elsass.me/2010/05/as3-fast-memory-access-without-alchemy/](http://philippe.elsass.me/2010/05/as3-fast-memory-access-without-alchemy/) . Suddenly I was wide awake. When it comes to handling certain crazy requirements, the speed of reading from and writing to a ByteArray in FlashPlayer just can't keep up. These past couple of days [Xu Can](http://www.asblog.org/) got pushed into having to hunt for some heretical, unofficial hack — and he actually found one. I'd heard before that haXe is so efficient because its author found the low-level interface FlashPlayer 10 provides for Alchemy, but for various reasons I never went and used haXe. Seeing these two pages showed me yet another trick — turns out they're all wares from the same circle. All three of them found the “back door” FlashPlayer 10 opened for Alchemy in order to boost performance at a low level.

Problem description: After switching systems, I found that I’d moved to the new Chrome 6. I wanted to use the debug version of the flashplayer plugin, so I installed “flashplayer 10.1 plugin debug” as usual. Once it was installed, I restarted Chrome and opened http://www.flashplayerversion.com/ and saw that the version was the latest one — but it wasn’t the debug version. That struck me as odd. Later I went into the Control Panel and uninstalled the flash plugin outright, but Chrome could still play flash! It turns out that both Chrome 5 and Chrome 6 ship with flashplayer built in, and it’s the latest version. That’s a good thing in itself, but for flash developers what’s needed is the debug build of fp, so you have to find a way to swap Chrome’s built-in fp for the debug version.

Since the project needs to render a large number of characters on the same screen, I needed to improve Flash Player’s rendering performance. This afternoon I ran a rendering performance test and polished up the bitmap optimization library I wrote last year. Screen size 2880*2880500 vector character animation MCs (nested 2 levels deep), looping playbackNone of them removeChild off-screen regionsAll tests run with the Flash Player SA 10.0 debug build No optimization, straight addChild fps=4, CPU maxed out, memory 18M~29M Added cacheAsBitmap FPS=1, CPU maxed out, memory 156~196M, memory keeps fluctuating

This article was reposted here after I saw it on http://riaoo.com/?p=1658; the original content comes from http://blogs.adobe.com/xwlin/2010/04/flash_player_101_-_adobe_max_2009.html and http://blogs.adobe.com/xwlin/2010/04/flash_player_101_-_adobe_max_2009_1.html Speaker: Lee Thomason (lthomaso@adobe.com) Translator: Lin Xiaowei (xwlin@adobe.com) PrefaceTime: the 21st of this month. Location: Beijing International Convention Center. Adobe is about to hold a two-day Flash Platform technology summit. I’ll have the honor of joining Ely Greenfield as co-speaker for the <> session, handling both the speaking and the translation. Ely Greenfield is a Senior Principal Scientist in the Apollo Integrated Runtime group, and he gave a superb talk on this topic at Adobe MAX 2007. I googled up a comment from a guy who attended the 2007 MAX conference about Ely himself and his talk: “I think Ely’s topic (Flash Player Internals) was the best of all the topics at MAX…” “Ely is that legendary guy who wrote most of the Flex Charting Framework in three days with his eyes closed”… The 2009 Adobe MAX still has a Flash Player Internals session, but the speaker is Lee Thomason (another hardcore veteran — Flash Player architect, nicknamed Player Guy, said to be the number one Flash Player guy). This is a very in-depth topic, and the talk moves fast: in one hour he covers as many aspects of the player architecture as he possibly can. Here I’ve summarized and translated the gist of his talk for your reference.