Disappointed... by Flash

[SomebodyElse]

I just got Flash8 and I'm trying this new AS2 crap. God it's so stupid. I have to "type" variables now. Not only I have to "type" them in with a keyboard, but I have to tell the computer what sort of variable it is. Flash used to be smart enough to figure this out on its own. Throw it a number and a string, add em up and Flash knew you wanted a number and did 20 different things to try to add those two different types of variables and usually succeeded. But now... NOW I get an ERROR. Oh, sorry MR. Dumbass Programmer, Flash is now suddenly too stupid to handle adding different data types, here's a nice "informative" error message. Oh thank you MR. frigging retarded Flash Cripplers of Macrodobe, I don't appreciate the changes you've made to my baby.

I bought Flash8, read the documentation, wrote 2 stupid AS2 programs and can now honestly say I've fully evaluated AS2 and am certain I want my AS1 back. AS2 SUX COX. AS3 will surely be the devils work. I'll stay with what makes me feel comfortable, good ole AS1. I mean AS3 sounds cool with it's full support of OOP, refined component set, beautiful scenery and fun-filled weekends but it's not worth the hassle. AS3 is stupid, I'm going home.

Comments welcome.

[Xeef]

I'll stay with what makes me feel comfortable, good ole AS1

this is the only part where i can agger
at least as fare as "stay with what makes me feel comfortable"

Ps. even in AS2 there is no need to strict type ;)

[newblack]

I totally sympathize. I bought a car today- what crap. My horse knew to start running just by me getting on and digging my stirrups into his keister. Stupid automobile needs a key and i have to turn it and press on a pedal- forget about it, i'm sticking to what's comfortable. Ever think of running for GOP presidency?

Try to appreciate why things change, not just how they affect your as1 'applications'.

[senocular]

typing is not manditory

[tg]

and as1 didnt always do type conversions.... many questions have been asked in the forums why 1+1== 11 instead of 2..... cause they were numbers as strings, not actual numbers.... thus the need for Number().

[jsebrech]

Why do I feel like making a remark about heads, and jokes flying over things? ;)

Without strict typing large projects would be a lot more bug-prone. All hail to the strict typing gods.

[Jesse]

My horse knew to start running just by me getting on and digging my stirrups into his keister.
Ahah what a great analogy. Good call :)

[senocular]

Yet I had a horse that bit your leg when you did that :p

[CyanBlue]

Well... I don't work with other developers, so I can choose whatever I feel like to... and I normally go by AS1 for three reasons...
#1. I do AS1 whole lot faster than AS2...
#2. I don't understand AS2 that well...
#3. I need to support the user with FP6...
#4. Flash compiles AS2 code down to AS1...
and the most important thing for me are #1 because there are lots of projects that I can just go and get it done quick and dirty and #3 because I still have to deal with the computers that are in educational system which normally do not provide fast upgrade process...

I am thinking of learning AS2 abit better so that I can prepare myself for AS3 because I want to enjoy the 'faster' execution speed of AVM2...(Obviously not fast enough but it is reasonably paster than AVM1...)

So, I guess it boils down to why you want to use Flash and how you want to use it...
Fundamentally the most important thing is your logic not your tool you use... Select whatever you are most comfortable with... Nobody is going to give you crap about it just because you are using an older technology... You will have some difficult time when you 'have to' step up and move up to the next laddar, but I think it does not really matter as long as you know what you do... That's my 2 cents... ;)

[Incrue]

Its really necessary to learn AS2 to understand AS3?I mean, AS2 is focused on classes, and what if its possible to make a swf in AS3 who dont use classes?

[Xeef]

a haven't try AS3 yet
but have take a short look
it's seams that whit out classes you can't do anything whit it ;)

Its really necessary to learn AS2 to understand AS3

no you can streight learn AS3 :p

even better learn PROGRAMING ! if you can program the language is a minort thing !
atleast i had no problem whit any language a have tryed !
of course i/you need a few days to get in to it and probably years to know anything abouth a specific language

but if you can drive a car you can drive a bus, a van and basicly anithing what has 4 or more wheels (whit more or less sucses) ;)

[outlando]

...AS3 is stupid, I'm going home.

Wow... someone spat their dummy out

[senocular]

AS3 has loads of improvements over AS1-2. Not only is it faster, but it was built from the ground up meaning that its more intuitive in situations like when dealing with movie clips. Everyone always wonders why you cant create a new movie clip object using new MovieClip(); Well now in AS3, you can (AS1-2 you couldn't because of its dependancy on legacy Flash behavior).

If you don't know AS2 now, you might want to wait for AS3. If AS3 was around prior to AS1, AS2 would be a hacked attempt to make AS1 look like AS3 despite the fact that it is still AS1. Because of this, there are certain behaviors in AS2 that don't work as expected and have changed in AS3 to work more correctly and intuitively (e.g. there is no longer any need for the Delegate class). However, knowing AS2 will help you greatly in learning AS3 because of their syntactic similarities. And Its true that essentially everything AS3 is class based. To take advantage of AS3, you'll want to be familiar with classes (though usage in the Flash 9 authoring environment outside of classes is yet to be seen).

AS3 is a big deal, for the speed if nothing else. If you want a well performing application, you'll want to make use of AS3.

CB, when you're ready to make the jump, let me know. I'd like to work with you on it. :)

[senocular]

Remaining posts moved to new thread in AS3 section

What's new in AS3 and how to get started using it today
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=106874

[[Sx]]

I totally sympathize. I bought a car today- what crap. My horse knew to start running just by me getting on and digging my stirrups into his keister. Stupid automobile needs a key and i have to turn it and press on a pedal- forget about it, i'm sticking to what's comfortable.

hahahaha... you've just made my day :cool:

Introduction of typecasting to AS (even tho only compile-time) is of same importance as move to the dot-syntax in Flash 5...

[senocular]

']Introduction of typecasting to AS (even tho only compile-time) is of same importance as move to the dot-syntax in Flash 5...

I dont know if I see that being the case. Type casting is only to catch your own mistakes (or help you). The change in AS in Flash 5 using dot syntax completely changed the way code was written and actually tended to simplify code as opposed to complicate it further.

[[Sx]]

It is at the current stage compile-time only, yes, but by putting the typecasting they've let the ginnie out of the bottle - no turning back now, so they'll have to make it run-time and then we can speak of AS as real useful language.

Biggest jump from Flash 4 to Flash 5 was the dot syntax.
Biggest jump from Flash 5 to Flash 6 was turning AS to useful OOP functionality (well, Flash 5 had it as well, but far from useful).
Biggest jump from Flash 6 to Flash 7 was introducing typecasting and classes structure
Since then it's only cosmetic changes to the AS including the AS3 (tho with AS3 comes completely different inner structure which is actually what makes AS3 desirable), while they focus more on designer needs, run-time effects and improving performance. The next big step will be introducing run-time typecasting (with improved exception handling and such things) and ability for real binary data manipulation, eventually methods overloading and such...

Typecasting was really a giant step from small, weak scripting language to fully-featured language...

[senocular]

For me, I think the new event handling was the biggest jump from 5 to 6. I dont think much happened in terms of OOP aside from a few fixes and changes in scope etc.

With AS3, you have more corrections to OOP as that seen in the jump from 5 to 6, but you also have a lot more additions and changes in structure. There is also runtime casting as well as runtime checking with AS3. I think AS3 is as big a change from AS1-2 as Flash 5 was from 4 which also included a lot more than just dot syntax.

[[Sx]]

AS3 doesn't have real run-time typecasting, it's more of simulated (like exception handling is kind-of simulated in AS2)... For real run-time typecasting we'll need to wait...

I still think that the best thing happened to Actionscript since the dot syntax is the typecasting. But, opinions are like ass holes, everybody's got one ;)

edit:
The biggest thing happened to Flash, not AS it self, since Flash 4->Flash 5 will definitely be the new structure coming with the AS3

[senocular]

For me (look at my ass hole! ;)), I see typecasting useful only to add performance and efficency to your application. Without that, and oh, maybe some type checking during runtime, they seem like a waste of effort. For Flash prior to 9, all types were essentially the same under the hood so it didn't make any difference (again, compile-time checking). At least with 9, we can get the benefit of some integer-based performance through checking. That makes me happy on that side of things.

[[Sx]]

I'm talking about the idea, not the implementation itself. Of course that compile-time typecasting is useful only for errors that might occur in the code it self. But typecasting, beside being a good coding practice, will eventually evolve into something useful - compile-time typecasting is just the first step. I can't imagine any serious high-level language without typecasting, it's the core of the syntax of any language, beside operators and routines.

Anyways, I think we've both seen enough of each others ass holes on the subject of typecasting and greatest AS improvements over the time ;)

[senocular]

Do you consider AS that high level? I guess it should be, given the whole "RIA" dealio. I guess I still see it as just some script kiddie-esque language for new grounds :p

[[Sx]]

Well, AS is getting less and less high-level with each new version. High-level languages doesn't mean 'highly capable' or 'heavy advanced' or 'superior to low-level languages' etc. - 'levelness' of a language comes from level of abstraction from the machine code - assembly is the most low-level language writable by humans, yet it's the most superior in terms of resources control. Flash 2-3-4 AS was far more high-level than AS3 for example. Scripting languages are in that terms the most high-level languages - abstraction is so big that they actually have nothing to do with the machine code. AS is now somewhere in-between high-level scripting and high-level programming language. At the current state, it misses only several things to be actually usable for programming, not just for scripting Flash's behavior. Of course, we already have a good palette of high-level programming languages so no need for a new-comer in form of AS there, and AS will probably always stay as a good scripting, interpreted language, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't get advanced structure allowing us programmers to do much more within Flash environment than it's currently possible. AJAX is a nice platform, but I seriously doubt it will be ever suitable for RIAs like Flash.

I haven't built a site, navigation menu or some eye-candy-crap in Flash for years - I solely see it's role as a great RIA platform. And I've worked, and I'm currently working on some extremely complex RIAs which I wouldn't thought will be possible on the web in decades - Flash made that possible within years. Now, it's only in my nature to brag about missing features that would make my life easier and which would greatly extend capabilities of Flash, specially the small things that could have been easily implemented in it and which would in return have a great impact on Flash's usability, but even in current state I really see no real alternative to Flash considering RIAs.

I guess most of my complains on the AS course comes from my C++/Java history, sometimes forgetting that AS is still only a scripting language, and that Flash is still used for other things than RIAs, and that still most of 'flashers' are people coming from the designers community, not programming, which might it find quite hard to follow programming evolution of a small, extremely useful language. I guess that's why MM/Adobe listens more to their requests than to 'ours' - money talks, and their target market is still within web-design community. However, I grew out to pretty much sympathy the Flash platform, so I guess I'm just trying to do some constructive criticism in order to make it much more powerful and useful. It wouldn't hurt if MM/Adobe would listen a bit more to us programmers - nothing advertises Flash better than RIAs... Let the AJAX/SVG take care of interactive eye-candies, Flash can do so much more...

[jsebrech]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that you would like to see added in flash?

[[Sx]]

I've already said that couple of times - most of those I have on my wish list since Flash 5 (since AS started to get useful shape). If we filter only the AS improvement wishes from my top50 list, in past years (including AS3) they've added: classes and packages structure (a bit clumsy but better something than nothing), typecasting (awkward but I'll hope they'll eventually fix it no matter what ECMAScript specs suggest), event handling (on low-level from AS3), exceptions handling (still far from useful, but with run-time typecasting and such it will eventually become a useful thing) and regex.

What's left from my list:
1. separation of Number object to int, unsigned int, float and unsigned float (partialy done in AS3), with run-time conversion
2. binary/byte/char, int64/long int/bigint and double/float64/bigfloat data types
3. real run-time typecasting including type-matching and type-conversion
4. methods overriding (including constructor method)
5. user definable pointers
6. abstract classes
7. bitwise operations on a float
8. multi-threading
9. synchronizing
10. MD5/SHA internal functions

And several other, mainly cosmetic, changes.

There are certainly a lot more things to be added to Flash, but putting in those from above could greatly improve Flash's usability, and those aint certainly such big things that MM/Adobe would need years to produce. They've rebuilt the structure almost from the scratch for AS3, so they could implement those without much trouble if they've wanted... I think that those are far more useful than plenty things that MM/Adobe forces, but again, I'm not the one who sets their priorities...

[CyanBlue]

That's very nice features, but if MM/Adobe adds all that, how the AS4(or AS9) different from Java or .NET, Sx???

One thing I don't understand is why MM tries to use the same framework for Flex and Flash... They use the same engine because MM had successfully made at least 75% of people install the Flash Player without any problem and they just want to share that user base for the new product...
But Flex and Flash has different user group... Mainly the Flash users are from the designers plus some, and Flex users are mainly with the backend programming skillsets...

And the new Flash Player 8.5/9 which has AVM1 and AVM2 mingled all together... That should have been a good timing when they could make the separation between two products, but it never happend... What does backward compatibility mean when you are creating a new beast???

I don't think the full-pleged RIA will work well with the average Joe's computer with Flash Player 9 very well... I know it might not be a good thing but your user base for the RIA apps will be abit higher than the average Joe who has faster computer and the new Flash Player Pro X that works only with the Flex app... and judging by the penetration rate of the Flash Player, the new one would not suffer much on that... (At least I hope that's the case...) But we are not going to that route, I guess...

It's all good to see the language evolving, but there is something wrong if that progress fails to bring along with the good part of users...
Think about it... An average designer who use Flash does not need to understand what the Class concept means or what integer and flot makes difference to the compiler and whatnots... They don't understand why the _alpha value does not increase/decrease by 1 and such thing does not make much sense/importance to their work...

Of course, this won't make any difference whether the head of Flash development team listens it or not, but at least that's what I think... :D

[jsebrech]

Let's see.

First of all, you mention the additional numeric types. Well, sure, adobe could add those types, but, I don't know if it would make sense. They wouldn't be good enough for high performance work (flash just is not the environment for high performance calculations), and the existing tools (ByteArray in AS3, and the regular bitwise logic operators in AS2) should be sufficient for implementing your own specialized numeric data types, in case you need it. I don't particularly feel the need for them to go further than providing a faster integer type for counters and the like, as they have in AS3.

About the abstract base classes and real method overriding, I am in complete agreement. AS2 is a nice attempt at hacking a decent syntax for OO onto the old system, but it wasn't good enough, and AS3 from what I've seen of it still doesn't go far enough.

And lord knows we would all like a mechanism for multi-threading. I fake it by using cooperative multi-threading, with a thread supervisor loop that assigns timeslots on an as-needed basis (by calling the execute function of a thread with the timeslot as argument). It works for my purposes, but let's face it, that's not real multi-threading, and I would very much like the real thing. It's not going to happen anytime soon I suspect, since most flash programmers would be incapable of understanding the consequences of true multi-threading (and the need for synchronization), and adobe would get swamped by bug reports for programmer errors. Plus, doing a good (and cross-platform!) multi-threading implementation is hard, as was demonstrated by java's initial go at it being flawed, and I doubt adobe is willing to invest the effort to satisfy such a small percent of the flash developer community.

The MD5 functions ... hmm ... I suppose that wouldn't be bad. I haven't needed it yet, but it wouldn't be bad to have a performant way of doing that. Just like how native XML support opened many doors.

What I'm most worried about though is player bloat. The current player is at the sweet spot. If they add too much functionality to it, player adoption rates will fall through the floor.

[Xeef]

It works for my purposes, but let's face it, that's not real multi-threading, and I would very much like the real thing.

Hmmm as long i see it it is !!!

As long you don't have a CPU whit 2 or more kernels !
then it woud need to by implemented on a love level to get advantages of it
but as long you haven't got more then 1 CPU
using an onenterFrame
it's the same as implementing it as a native comand (ok it woud by abit faster)
windows is also not doing anithing else then having an "onEnterFrame" runing and calling the tasks one after each

yeh MD5 functions woud by nice

and a image compresion !!!! what ever it is JPG , pic , gif
there are definetly free onec whit out the need of lizensing !
or can i get whit AS3 compresed image data to by send to a server ?

[[Sx]]

Ok, one by one...

@CyanBlue
Flash will stay a lot different from Java or .NET technologies as those are entirely different concepts. Additional features would only strengthen the Flash's position and really put the last nail into the Java-on-the-web coffin. We can all see that Flash takes more and more market share on the web literally putting out of business old technologies. For example, Video in Flash destroyed somewhat monopoly of QT, WMP and Real on the web - who ever forced the video component (even tho it increased plugin size for about 200kb) should get a medal. They've succeeded where all others failed - easy to use, customize and cross-platform web video/audio player. Same goes for all other stuff - MM/Adobe is seriously attacking the market where various plugins and Sun held the monopoly - and it does it in one compact, resource-wise way.

As for Flex/Flash differences, I think that this separation was totally unnecessary. You still have code-guide, templates and so for design-oriented people, so improving the RIA capabilities would only come as a plus - considering spread of flash player it not only threatens Java, it threatens the AJAX as well. Adding little things to make life easier to us programmers would only be a plus in MM/Adobe's chart... After all, if it wasn't for us, Flash's target usage would still be only interactive menus, eye-candy sites and fancy vector animations. Luckily, MM realized that on time and put additional efforts to make AS really useful language for RIAs...

As for resources, don't worry - the more control you give to the programmers, the more options they'll have for optimizing their applications. Being on a verge of introducing Vista, XFree86 w/ 3D acceleration support and Mac OSX which already uses that for couple of years, it wont be long before Flash player starts using GPU for complex calculations and rendering, boosting it's performance significantly.

@jsebrech
ByteArray is a bull - I wrote similar class in Flash 5 for that purpose. What use is a ByteArray when you can't use bitwise operators between multiple bytes? It's a big handicap in binary data manipulation. And don't forget it's simulated type - it's close to making a regular array filling it with ints. Also, long int would be a great addon - I'm writing simulation classes for those for years and implementing such a feature to a low-end structure would give a serious performance boost. Adding unsigned type to float is also extremely useful in some situations (e.g. bitwise operations on a float, tho those does not exist yet in Flash). There are some cases when different number types gives you greater control over the data structure. Apart from those, run-time typecasting and type-morphing are definitely a must. Sure, you can use int(float) or Math.round/ceil/floor to convert floats to ints, but nothing beats in performance low-level implementation of those. So far, the only 'real' low level of converting a float to int is to bitwise shift it for 0 bytes ( float<<0 ). Such morphings comes really helpful when dealing with complex math calculations, for example simulating a 3D engine.

As for abstract classes and overriding, I really see no reason why it's not yet implemented. It really isn't a big thing to add, and it would make life a lot easier and class structures far more logical than it is now.

About multithreading, I've created my own class that does that (uses setInterval and fires an event to each registered thread) but that's far from multi-threading as it's still dependent on the fps and movie structure (if some script in some clip takes too much time, setInterval does not execute parallel with same resources privileges). Of course it's quite hard to add, specially for multi-platform system, and not even to mention that giving such controls to Flash community which, unfortunately, still consists mainly of designers-turned-to-scripters, may give Flash a bad name (that's where Java failed - they assumed that all Java developers are good, responsible programmers able to use, not abuse, Java's functionality), but still - it would be really sweeeeeeet to have those. I'd kill for multithreading & synchronization in Flash - it would open a whole new horizons - but I realize that it wont happen soon. Still, most of the things from my list could have been added 'yesterday' with no troubles. I'd kill for user-controllable pointers as well, and those are far easier than multithreading and certainly not platform-dependent. After all, we have automatic pointers since Flash 5.

As for MD5/SHA internal functions, it's the same case as with XML, regex, get query parser and etc. - no biggie but surely makes life easier. They've waited for AS3 to add simple regex that could have been there since Flash 5. They'll of course always excuse themselves with 'we don't want to bloat the player', but that's just bullshit. They've been saying that for eons, and then when they get good enough pressure from the community they put it in and - what a miracle - no player bloat. I've talked about their famous excuse @ http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showpost.php3?p=490499&postcount=19.

After all, Flash progresses far slower than CPU speed, RAM memory, HDD sizes and bandwidths are. So, 100-200kb on the player every several years is not an impact given the goodies you get from those. Good MD5/SHA algorithms when compiled take less than 10kb - is that a bloat? I consider much more a bloat having 2 XML parsers of similar usage (the old native and ECMAScript-proposed E4X) in AS3 than those hefty little functions.

@Xeef
Muti-threading is not about real, hardware based threading. It's about splitting resources to parallel processes. It's like opening 2 flash players in the same window - they will share resources equally, but each will do it's chores independent of the other. Synchronizing is kind-of gluing the threads to act dependently for some time when needed (for example changing same variable in each thread with no need for referencing all available threads). By giving multi-threading to Flash you would be able to start a new, independent thread that would do it's chores separately from the rest of the system. For example, most chat servers use multi threading to separate user control classes from the rest of the server, allowing the server to focus on handling income connections separated from the user's handling.

onEnterFrame/setInterval certainly doesn't give you that as their performance depends on rest of the movie - they are fired only when rest of the code dedicated to that 'scope' executes.

About image/video compressions, content manipulating and so - it's more of Flash features than AS features. AS didn't change a bit when images were allowed to load - it used the same MovieClip.loadMovie method, but Flash's backend handled how it will be loaded. If I would list my Flash-features list, I'm afraid we'll get in far bigger discussion, so let's focus on AS improvements ;)

[Xeef]

i not see a big diference in implementig a MD5/SHA
or a JPG
both are manipulating data
as long i know there is even a class whit PNG compression for F8
it's just slow but i think it coud by implemented whitout big efort on a low level


simulating mulltithread :


function TaskMan() {
this = arguments.callee;
var T = getTimer();
if (this.tasks[this.I].TaskTime == undefined) {
if (this.tasks[this.I].execTime == undefined) {
this.tasks[this.I].execTime = T;
this.tasks[this.I].TaskTime = 0;
} else {
this.tasks[this.I].TaskTime = this[this.tasks[this.I].P];
}
this.curentTime = 0;
this.CallS = 0;
}
this.tasks[this.I]();
T = getTimer()-T;
this.tasks[this.I].totalCalls++;
this.tasks[this.I].execTime = (this.tasks[this.I].execTime*this.tasks[this.I].totalCalls+T)/(this.tasks[this.I].totalCalls+1);
this.tasks[this.I].TaskTime -= T;
this.curentTime += T;
this.CallS++;
if (this.tasks[this.I].TaskTime<=0) {
this.tasks[this.I].TaskTime = undefined;
trace("time :"+this.curentTime+" calls:"+this.CallS+" time/call:"+int(this.tasks[this.I].execTime)+" "+this.tasks[this.I].N+" Priority:"+this.tasks[this.I].P);
this.I = ++this.I%this.tasks.length;
}
//trace(this.tasks[this.I].execTime);
}
TaskMan.Start = function(F, P, N) {
F.N = N;
F.P = P;
F.totalCalls = 0;
TaskMan.tasks.push(F);
};
TaskMan.tasks = [];
TaskMan.Min = 10;
TaskMan.Low = 100;
TaskMan.Normal = 200;
TaskMan.High = 500;
TaskMan.Max = 1000;
TaskMan.I = 0;
setInterval(TaskMan, 0);
//
function CalCulate() {
this = arguments.callee;
for (var a = 0; a<10000; a++) {
}
}
TaskMan.Start(CalCulate, "Low", "CalCulate");
//
function doSomethingElse() {
this = arguments.callee;
for (var a = 0; a<1000; a++) {
X = Math.sqrt(a);
}
}
TaskMan.Start(doSomethingElse, "Min", "doSomethingElse");
//
function ABC() {
this = arguments.callee;
for (var a = 0; a<100000; a++) {
X = Math.sqrt(a);
}
}
TaskMan.Start(ABC, "Max", "ABC");


OK separation is on a prety high level (you coud go even one level depher where by i am afread that woud mean to write an interpreter)
but flash is so or so slow so for a bit multitasking whit it shoud the above by fine ?!

[jsebrech]

@Sx

For a 3D engine I'd rather see something like java3d, but flashified. That negates most of the reason for advanced bitwise calculations. But, when you think about it, you really do need the maths for physics engines, so, I suppose, I'll let you win me over on this one.

On the player bloat, I disagree that adding 100 to 200 KB a year is not a big deal. Most of the world is still on dialup, and dialup is not getting faster, nor will it ever. Broadband is still for the lucky few, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. My company has some big corporate customers that require that our web apps are usable on dialup. Big downloads == lost sales.

@Xeef

The benefits of built-in multi-threading over hacking something together like your example are numerous. Firstly you can add multi-threading to existing flash content, which will let you combine old stuff into new stuff much more effectively. Secondly, because the context-switching between threads would become much faster, you could let each thread execute for a shorter time without affecting throughput, which in turn would improve responsiveness. Improving responsiveness without hurting throughput is a must if you are able, so it really bites that macromedia never offered us the tools.

Still, I suspect that adding multi-threading to the entire player, functional for all pre-existing content, would be very, very difficult. Perhaps they're even now slowly adapting the internals to get them to a point where it becomes feasible. You just don't know. And, one thing I can guarantee is that if it becomes possible, some people will post ready-made scripts to "stop the movie from blocking", and someone else will paste that script into their code, and it won't work one time out of every twenty, and they'll come here asking why, and those won't be fun threads to answer.

[Xeef]

it just came i my mind

start 2 or more separate SWF and comunicate whit localconnection

real multithreading


:p

[jsebrech]

Do multiple flash movies actually execute in parallel? I doubt that's the fact, since flash will block the entire browser while it's executing a function.

[Xeef]

Hmmmm
i wasn't expect this !

indeed in a browser it doesn't works :(
in standalone playerS works (half way)