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- The ability to generate sound dynamically! You can thank Andre Michelle and his Adobe, Make Some Noise! campaign for that one. In Flash 9, this was only possible using a clever hack, but now Adobe has added a very nice, compact API to pass data to the sound card. What's this mean? An all-encompassing Flash/AIR media player, and a better visualizer, of course. :)

- 3d transforms! You can now move and rotate interactive DisplayObjects in 3d space. It'll be exciting to see PaperVision, Away3d, et al be updated to take advantage of this.

- Pixel shaders! Finally, we can easily make the directional motion blur we all want. Also, keep an eye out for cool normal mapping type effects. :)

- 'Skeletal' IK animation. I'm personally not too excited for this one, but maybe I'll see some cool demos or animations that'll change my mind.

- Possibly the most boring feature is the most exciting to me: Strictly typed arrays! In Flash 9, arrays were not typed, so each time you accessed an array, you would cause a runtime type check -- slooooow. Creating a typed array will increase performance and promote type safety!

- A few other nice-ities, like being able to fade, rotate, and stretch device fonts. :)

Exciting stuff! I'm anxious to start playing with it, but I'm still crunching on Castle Crashers. Keep up the good work, Adobe!

Updated: 05/21/08 1:56 PM Log in to comment! | Share this!

The People Have Spoken

37 Comments

May. 21, 2008 | 2:50 PM KupaMan says:

This is going to be the coolest update of flash ever. I'm super pumped.

May. 21, 2008 | 3:05 PM Atgod88 says:

I dont know what you said but sounds awsome

May. 21, 2008 | 3:11 PM TripleDK says:

Wait, you're in the Behemoth too?

May. 21, 2008 | 3:50 PM Phil says:

Sound great!

May. 21, 2008 | 4:23 PM RPGamer says:

Awesome

May. 21, 2008 | 9:55 PM ngfan14 says:

I'm going to try it out. It looks really cool.

May. 22, 2008 | 2:12 AM BlueHippo says:

That's funny, skeletons is one of the only things i'm really looking forward to, heh. But, I'm not a coder, so.. the demo I saw for flash 10 long ago had a cool example of using skeletons, and slapping on some blurb of action script and the character would dangle from the limbs.. was pretty cool. Still, not to exciting from the coding perspective ;)

But I did learn some from this post.. the 3D space is cool, would be neat if eventually would addapt some more z space features found in After Effects.. Currious to play around with the sound creator, perhaps this will be a new way for the clocks to do their speech? heh. Pixel shaders is way too code oriented and over my head, but I've always wanted a better blur control.

Thankfully adobe will ensure flash will be around for quite a while. Which is good, or else I'd be out of a job ;)

May. 22, 2008 | 2:17 AM Nuttro says:

what does this mean for flash 8?

May. 22, 2008 | 3:06 AM WolfBlitz2 says:

I'll wait when it is fully complete
I have an update for 9 and it keeps fucking up on me!

May. 22, 2008 | 5:10 AM Sterance says:

TYPED ARRAYS??!?!!!? that is amazing!

I always wished actionscript was extremely type safe and I hated coding in it because it isn't type safe. Type safe arrays in actionscript sound amazingly awesome.

May. 22, 2008 | 8:27 AM michaelsetiyawan says:

tomorrow
in 27/may/2008 is my bithday
13 to 14 years old!

May. 22, 2008 | 11:07 AM GuyWithHisComp says:

YOU'RE LATE!

Anyway, the Vector class is the one I look forward to the most.

And I have for some months now...

May. 22, 2008 | 12:39 PM mike responds:

i am late! :(

May. 22, 2008 | 12:12 PM BlueHippo says:

Nuttro: What do you mean? We are actually already on flash player 9, heh. 8 Is kinda outdated, but I mean, you can still make things for flash 8. More recent flash players can play older flash versions ;)

May. 22, 2008 | 6:54 PM Imacow says:

That skeletal motion thing is going to flood the portal with more of those dumb Pivot like flashes.

May. 22, 2008 | 6:59 PM WolfBlitz2 says:

I miss macromedia

May. 22, 2008 | 7:31 PM jamescote72095 says:

is it true that there is a hack for newgrounds!?!?!?

May. 22, 2008 | 8:36 PM Wiiporter says:

this is almost relevant to my interests! You did it!

May. 23, 2008 | 8:11 AM PiGPEN says:

Mike i got a super serial question!
Now theres that 3d thing yes? It makes 3d native. But theyre not including 3d objects so its just for coders and to make 3d effects for 2d easier.
But theyre also including IK now... now i dont know the specifics of how IK works so correct if im completely wrong but wouldnt it be possible to connect a bunch of clips with teh IK into a closed loop to essentially create a 3d object?

May. 23, 2008 | 12:51 PM Archon68 says:

Yay!

May. 23, 2008 | 1:32 PM RSQViper says:

What the...

Didn't Flash 9 JUST come out?

In any case, this looks like a better update. The 3D thing and pixel shaders is nice. But that skeletal IK looks liek my kind of deal.

Dude, it's bones. If you've ever animated 3D this is where it's at. Wait until you see animations using this type of coding.

May. 23, 2008 | 5:41 PM johnsom says:

This kind of thing sounds really awesome, but I'm not the kind of techno magician.
Perhaps someone can fill me in on this and tell me how I can use this feature?

May. 23, 2008 | 7:10 PM pizzalover3000 says:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYY YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY YYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

May. 23, 2008 | 7:34 PM johnsom says:

Uuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmm................
......... sorry?

May. 23, 2008 | 7:58 PM johnsom says:

I'm a newbie around here, even though I've heard and watched many things on this site already. I've just recently made an acount here.

May. 26, 2008 | 1:41 PM Toukeman says:

im starting my flash carrer and i am downloading this but it should be a while before i understand this nonsense of animation so wish me luck :)

May. 26, 2008 | 7:14 PM Paradox says:

bah, had to reinstall Flash Player 9 when watching videos on some sites.

guess i'll wait till the final release.

May. 26, 2008 | 11:37 PM RubberNinja says:

Looks like I'll finally be upgrading from Flash 8.

May. 29, 2008 | 12:13 AM thoughtpolice says:

I was really impressed by the FP10 beta, honestly. I've never touched AS3, but it might be worth downloading the beta + Flex and write some applications to do this stuff. I always love the bleeding edge. :) Then again I have no idea - if you could give a pointer as to where I could start out with this new fangled stuff it would be appreciated.

Also, strictly typed arrays seem like a big win and an obvious oversight, to me, anyway. It would be interesting to post performance comparisons for typed arrays vs. untyped ones; I imagine the penalty imposed by a runtime type check for *every* access of the array to be substantial in some cases.
Also, in the case of untyped arrays, do you happen to know if the typecheck done at runtime is done on *every* access? Seems to me having the array's type cached for future reference would make more sense if it is. In any case, typed arrays seem like a big win!

Unfortunately I'm betting that as a Linux user I'll be somewhat ostracized for right now. :( I'll have to wait for my MacBook to get to me later this week before giving anything a shot.

Jun. 4, 2008 | 6:53 PM Yrtnej says:

Amazing! I can't wait [until I have more money to get this!]

Jun. 13, 2008 | 11:34 AM LordZeebmork says:

This is going to be fucking great. The main feature that I was looking forward to was the IK animation, but now that I have seen this, I think I'll end up playing with the sound generation first.

Although what I really want is the ability to edit bitmaps at runtime so I can port the fun raster effects I did in BASIC and Processing years ago to Flash. I have no idea if that has already been done though.

I also hope they fixed that fucking annoying bug in Flash 8 where if you try to put a graphic on a layer right after a tween of a graphic, the graphic you try to put on the stage gets replaced with the tweened graphic.

Jun. 19, 2008 | 7:55 PM BlueHippo says:

Here's some video examples of some of the things you talked about:

http://www.gotoandlearn.com/player.ph p?id=74
http://www.gotoandlearn.com/player.ph p?id=75
http://www.gotoandlearn.com/player.ph p?id=76

Jun. 19, 2008 | 8:07 PM BlueHippo says:

Wow I feel kinda stupid... just found this:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/fl ashplayer10/demos/

Man, a ton of cool stuff. Those custom filters are really neat, I can't wait to see what some coders can do with this :0

Jun. 21, 2008 | 3:48 AM crashsite says:

sounds nice but im sure adobe will want to put a $500 price tag on the fineshed version

Jun. 27, 2008 | 4:54 PM Mich says:

I'm a little bit afraid of that dynamic sound...

People are going to abuse that to annoy people with their flash...
generating high tones and stuff... :(

Jul. 8, 2008 | 10:42 AM JBPresents says:

I have been aware of the beta for a little while and I can't wait for the full version to come out. I am not very good at as3 yet but with all the advances happening the move to it will be forced soon enough.

although like I said I will probably wait for the full version release before I start to develop in as3.

thanks for the updates :)

Jul. 10, 2008 | 6:19 PM Jozzalanco says:

It's funny that I downloaded and installed Flash Player 10 Beta 5 minutes before you posted it.

I like it. I can't notice anything on the outside, but I know that it's doing a lot of things differently on the inside.

Sep. 22, 2008 | 12:40 PM BasV says:

Yes! Typed arrays!? Finally! They should have added that in as3 directly. Just too bad that they can't be easily initialised like in Java, new int[], something like that. And how did they come up with the name Vector ?