Flash Player Internals video

At Adobe MAX, Flash Player Engineers Jim Corbett and Lee Thomason did a great session that is now available on tv.adobe.com. The session features performance tips, details about the new GPU mode, Text enhancements, DrawingAPI and the headless search engine version of the Flash Player - a must see for serious Flash developers.

The two engineers are very open about things deep inside the Flash Player such as garbage collection, what happens in AVM1/2 on each frame and how the three different subsystems for text rendering work (Saffron, Adobe CCF,  Macromedia legacy engine).

There's some great performance tips shared as well. One is to only use "Anti-alias for Animation" if the text is actually being moved about on screen. If it's not, this mode will lower your playback speed since it requires more processing power.

Another tip is to try to avoid extending MovieClip or any other dynamic class for anything requiring performance. Dynamic classes require lot's of extra lookup to check if properties are present and so forth.

The session also offers details about the new unloadAndStop method for Loader's. The method goes through the entire loaded displayobject and removes bitmaps, eventListeners, fonts from memory. It also stops all MovieClips, downloads, audio and video streams. This great addition will let you remove every bit of a loaded SWF and since it's quite "brutal", this method is referred to internally as "The Hammer".

I especially enjoyed hearing more details about the experimental GPU acceleration features in Flash Player 10. GPU mode currently accelerates video transforms, simple blending, simple 2.5D (Flash 10 = Postcards in Space) and bitmap transforms. This video also tells how to forcefully enable GPU mode (at your own peril) and also explains why GPU mode is taking time: GPU mode will only work on machines that have drivers that are verified by the GPU manufacturers. This is a process that takes time, but since the promise is "crazy, crazy fast graphics" it is probably worth the wait?

At the very end, there's even a short mention of a new settings manager for the Flash Player. This video is highly recommended for Flash Developers that do more than "just making a living" from Flash.

NOTE: I highly recommend not viewing this video on the official tv.adobe.com site, but rather as an embedded version like on Peter Elst's blog. This disables the fullscreen feature, but there is a serious bug in the "Full Flash" Adobe TV site that redraws the entire screen on every frame. This consumes so much CPU that it makes your browser irresponsive and renders the play/pause/seek controls worthless. This session is just a plain slideshow with audio, so this really shouldn't happen. Please fix this Adobe or make the site HTML so it's possible to use it. There's nothing on this site that requires the use of Flash over HTML - it's just an annoyance.

 

 

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