The latest version of AIR/Flash for Desktop has enabled the option to turn off anti-aliasing!
This was a critical feature in the browser version of Flashplayer for improving performance, but for whatever lazy reason, Adobe never cared to include it in the Desktop version. Game devs have been asking Adobe for this feature for 10 years!
HARMAN, the new company which is managing AIR/Flash, added the feature immediately when asked about it.
Flash’s customer service has improved dramatically after its death!
I’m making this blog post to point out that porting Flash games to Desktop is trivially easy now.
The lack of the “LOW” and “MEDIUM” anti-aliasing options meant that Flash games on Desktop required twice the CPU resources compared to browsers, but now that’s no longer an issue. For my games, I had to use very awkward work-arounds to add these anti-aliasing options – it cost me a couple of weeks of work and frustration, and the games still have some bugs because of it.
Any developers following my footsteps will have a much easier job porting their games today.
(feel free to ask me for advice if you want)
Hopefully this doesn’t come too late to be useful!
Anyway, what this means for EBF5 is that it won’t need stupid workarounds to work correctly anymore.
In a future update, it could:
• Use “windowed fullscreen” mode in different resolutions – no need to change the monitor resolution with QRes.exe anymore. (This also makes it easy to add support for a bigger variety of resolutions)
• The “fullscreen”, “exit” and “save” features won’t time-out anymore, this is a bug that slower machines encounter.
There may be other advantages I haven’t noticed yet!
