Astro

Adobe had a really interesting announcement at their Max 2007 conference which I was not able to attend. Thankfully there were press and bloggers to attend the conference so that I could find out about the next version of the Flash player. It appears that Adobe is taking Silverlight and Java FX as serious competition and have decided to raise the stakes with the version 10 of Flash. The best part is that it appears as if they will be giving me exactly the feature that I want.

Flash player 10, which is code named Astro, is going to have much better text support. Wait...that's not it. Astro is going to support 3D. The demo only showed manipulation of sprites and movie clips using x, y, z coordinates and rotation along all three axes. I am assuming that this will be done using hardware 3D acceleration. No mention about support for 3D models was mentioned, but if there is hardware accelerated rendering of 3D sprites, it would probably be fairly trivial to port Papervision3D's Collada support.

I am not aware of any estimated release date or if there is going to be a public beta. If there is, I will certainly try to participate in the beta program. Right now I am trying to make sure that the renderer that I am developing for Coffee Quest Revenge is modular so that it will be easy to swap out with a better one if Astro is released significantly earlier than I am anticipating.