Adobe AIR Development

[RottenOgre]

Stage3D is very important to get highly performant 2D and 3D AIR apps on the PlayBook (and presumably it will be just as  important with BB10 devices).

Moving forward, stage3D is the renderer of choice for AIR applications and that is the direction various frameworks and engines are heading toward. If a developer is building an AIR app for iOS and Android using a stage3D framework, how likely do you think it is that they will rewrite the app to target non-stage3D on the PlayBook? 

RIM has been awesome in pushing out a ton of different optons to write apps for the PlayBook - please don't miss this opportunity to continue in that direction.

[Innovatology]

Another clip, this time of Unreal Tournament 3:

[that_corey]

I'd like stage3d, just because I will be compiling to multiple platforms, and the others already support it, so why would I want to have a separate branch just for playbook?

[shawnblais]

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RottenOgre wrote:

Moving forward, stage3D is the renderer of choice for AIR applications and that is the direction various frameworks and engines are heading toward. If a developer is building an AIR app for iOS and Android using a stage3D framework, how likely do you think it is that they will rewrite the app to target non-stage3D on the PlayBook? 

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Yep. There's about to be an explosion of Stage3D based 2D games with AIR, targetting Android and iOS. It's by far the fastest path to creating cross platform games, and we're seeing native performance levels.

RIM is effectively removing Playbook, and BB10 as a portable targets.  Ridiculous. Not many dev's are going to rewrite their rendering engine simply to support a fringe platform.

Playbook has a PowerVR SGX540, an industry standard gpu that is in tons of Android and iOS devices. Most of the work to support this gpu must already be inside AIR 3.2...  

[jtegen]

I dont know why people are saying that BB devices are out of the market without Stage3D. True, it does not have it today -- publically, but that does mean that they are not working on it and that an announcement might be coming soon. Does any developer ever really say that big feature XYZ will be in a future release unless they know for certain it can be done and that a lot of it has been implemented before such an announcement? And would not such an announcement be better if they can demonstrate their implementation with game or app ABC and provide some kind of benchmarks in how theirs is better than Android and iOS?

Things take time:

• Decide to do it.
• Can it be done
• Can it be done well
• Impact to other components, APIs
• Impact to schedules
• Prototypes, client betas
• Marketing

If you really need it today, become a RIM preferred partner, and you will probably get better access to things like this.  For the rest of us, patience is needed.  RIM knows about this. I probably have a dozen apps in different stages.  Some are on hold because of a feature is needed.  But that does not stop work on current apps or other apps that down the road, might use this feature.

[Innovatology]

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jtegen wrote:

I dont know why people are saying that BB devices are out of the market without Stage3D. True, it does not have it today -- publically, but that does mean that they are not working on it and that an announcement might be coming soon. 

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John, the uncertainty comes from this post from Julian in which he says:

"As of right now, we currently do not have a timeline for when and if PlayBook OS will get AIR 3.2."

Note the "and if". If course I fully appreciate that it will take time to implement on PlayBook, and personally I am not too worried about the timing. As long as it's being taken seriously.

That's the reason for this thread: to let RIM know of our interest, enthusiasm and concerns. I'd hate to see AIR become  a second class citizen on PlayBook and BB10.  I think it offers unique capabilities and workflows that other environments do not. However, the fact that the e-mail, calendar and contacts apps are built in AIR helps a little.

[jtegen]

Let's see what happens with BBTOS 2.0.1 release. My guess is that something like AIR 3.2 would be a larger release and that we all would get early betas to make certain our apps work with 3.2. So with that, we probably wont know anything until after 2.0.1.

At this point, I have faith that RIM is 100% behind AIR because it is easier to create apps (and may always be) then with the NDK. With AIR 3.2, you may get more titles since developers will protect their development investment because it can then be easily ported to Android and iOS.  I was able to move a couple of my apps over to the Android in about 30 minutes of time.  AIR 3.2 will blur the lines for gamers and it may be nealy impossible to know if it was in NDK or AIR 3.2.

I also have faith that we will see AIR 3.2 before BB10 betas.  Without it, RIM will just make it more diffilcult to attract and maintain developers (and consumers).

[Innovatology]

Stage3D is now officially available for IOS, Android and desktops and Adobe has announced a partnership with Unity:

"Launching AIR 3.2, Flash Player 11.2, and Premium Features for Gaming"

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/03/gameon.html

[greg209]

Just read that post myself - but you beat me to updating this thread

So Flash Player 11.2 and Air 3.2 are officially out now. Hoping for an Playbook OS update from RIM soon to bring it in line.

[Innovatology]

Related news: the Alternativa3D framework, used for building apps like the MAX racer shown in the top video of first post of this thread, is now open source:

http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2012/03/29/alternativa3d-8-is-out-in-open-source/