New features in Flash 10
Here’s a quick list of new stuff listed in Adobe’s demo page:
- New Text Engine
- Inverse Kinematics
- Custom Effects
- GPU Compositing: New but has some serious problems at the moment. More info at Tinic Uro’s blog.
- Dynamic Streaming: Not useful at the moment yet because it needs to work with a new version of Flash Media Server. This protocol allows lossy delivery.
- Improved Drawing API: Senocular has a detailed tutorial about it. The new Vector data type and drawPath and drawTriangles will give significant performance boost for Papervision3D and all other 3D engines.
- Native 3D: Native but very raw. Only supports rotation inf 3 dimensions. But I’m sure it means a lot for Papervision3D guys. There’ll be significant performance improvement in the never version of Papervision3D.
And some features not covered in the demo:
- Dynamic Sound Generation: You can directly talk to the sound card (sort of)! Try Keith Peter’s demo and be a musician using your mouse.
- FileReference Runtime Access: Now you can directly work on user’s local files. Previously, you need to upload a file to the server, download the file from server and then you can edit it. It’s much easier now. For more info, please refer to Draw Lgoic’s blog.
- MouseCursor: A new class to set Mouse cursor.
- Text field using device fonts can be animated now, transparency or scaling are all possible out of the box.
Every single feature leads to a whole new area of excitement to explore. You can see the new functions here.