Flash/SWF player

[prehensile]

Hey all,

Just posted soemthing to the HL2D sticky thread in General Talk along similar lines, but thought I'd expand here...

I'm not a programmer (but I AM a Flash developer and resonably technically minded), and it seems to me that a Flash/SWF player would be a very VERY cool thing to have on GP32, not only so we could play existing Flash content, but it could also open up a whole new route for development... And I reckon if players can exist on PalmOS/WinCE/mobile devices, then surely GP32 should be able to tackle it?

I've seen a few threads which have discussed this so far, most bemoan the lack of any source then degrade into a "My Favourite Flash movies/games" thread. So, in the interests of progression, here's some open source projects I found:

http://swfdec.sourceforge.net/
- promising, but relies on a lot of *nix libraries...

http://tubesock.sourceforge.net/
- Seems a bit dead, but got as far as playing some simple movies.

http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html
- More promising, seems to be in active development, but uses HW acceleration/SDL and doesn't support Actionscript yet, so no games

Also worth checking out:

http://www.openswf.org/

http://sswf.sourceforge.net/SWFalexref.html

http://www.quiss.org/swftools/

 

[papapopalung]

someone should tell gamepark... <_< and get them to sort out the java while they're at it

 

[gogobrent]

I think its a great IDEA
-----
Dont you wanna play XiaoXiao 9 on your GP32.
Huh!!??? HUH??

 

[GP32 Kirby]

Is there any open-source flash players that use the SDL libraries? (I dunno anything about SDL so sorry if that's a dumb question) If so then Chui could maybe port it cuz that person's ported some neat SDL stuff

 

[Evil_Cartman]

WE WANT FLASH! WE WANT FLASH!

ahtm2 would be sweet on my GP.

 

[rcx21000]

I don't think that anyone is going to add ActionScript to any flash thingy for the GP32... It's hard to do, and it uses PC thingies like keyboard and mouse (and it might be to slow to do on a 133MhZ processor?)

 

[prehensile]

Is there any open-source flash players that use the SDL libraries? (I dunno anything about SDL so sorry if that's a dumb question) If so then Chui could maybe port it cuz that person's ported some neat SDL stuff

The first one I listed, Swfdec, uses SDL for sound, and on doing a little further reading looks to be the best candidate for for a gp32 port- from the site:

Swfdec is a library for rendering Flash® animations and games. It was originally designed as a basis library for creating Flash plugins for GStreamer, but it is a fully standalone library which only use the libart library for drawing. Swfdec is released under the LGPL.

and

swfdec is created using Ansi C and using the libart library as the drawing library.

So to port would require a port of libart as well, but the rest of it being standalone and in standard ANSI C seems good. If I had the time, I'd look into it, but at the moment my uni degree is ruling my life...

 

[GP32 Kirby]

This is really, REALLY interesting stuff indeed.. if someone can port libart to the GP32 sucessfully then there may be a chance we'll finally be playin Flash movies on our GP32!

rcx21000: I think most people would be aware of that by now, but at least we could watch some brilliant movies that are available for the GP32.. but if you're going to be pretty much a "hardcorist" GP32 owner you might wanna attempt getting Mr. Spiv's keyboard drivers and installing the Erricson keyboard thingy to your GP32.. all you would need then for mouse "emulation" is to move the cursor through the GP32's control stick

EDIT: Oh, almost forgot to mention.. just searched up google and found this page about the libart library (Not sure if it has a downloadable source there, I only scanned through the page contents but it probably has it)

http://www.gnome.org/~mathieu/libart/libart.html

Think porting this is possible? Please say yes!

 

[Evil_Cartman]

IF a flash player gets released, then it has to support flash 6 so we can get LOTS of animation on it. And even better Flash 7.

This would also open a whole new way of developing for the GP32. I could make stuff for it, i'm pretty good at flash.

 

[prehensile]

Think porting this is possible? Please say yes!

Heh, starting to get out of my depth. Something to put to the proper developers, I suspect... I have had a bit of a poke around various GP32 dev sites and lists, and haven't seen any mention of libart... anyone know where a good place would be to see if anyone's interested in taking this up?

 

[GP32 Kirby]

IF a flash player gets released, then it has to support flash 6 so we can get LOTS of animation on it. And even better Flash 7.

Perfect Kirby uses Flash 5, so i'm hoping it could be at least a 5 But yeah, the higher the better

Oh, and another thought just popped into my head: it will be possible to toggle between rendering qualities (Low, Medium and High), wouldnt it? Putting it on low would probably accelerate the GP32's playback performance, plus seeing it's squeezed down to the small screen ya'd probably not notice much difference in low quality

 

[unit3]

Perfect Kirby uses Flash 5, so i'm hoping it could be at least a 5 But yeah, the higher the better

Oh, and another thought just popped into my head: it will be possible to toggle between rendering qualities (Low, Medium and High), wouldnt it? Putting it on low would probably accelerate the GP32's playback performance, plus seeing it's squeezed down to the small screen ya'd probably not notice much difference in low quality

Well, I think the libraries we're looking at initially only support Flash 4 right now. But there's nothing much we can do about this short of writing our own Flash 5/6/7 support.

Also, the quality think (AFAIK) relates to how much antialiasing it does on the edges of the objects. Unfortunately, I doubt the GP32 is fast enough to run much of anything with any[.i] sort of software antialiasing. At the same time, the low screen resolution I think will make the lack of antialiasing more[.i] noticable, not less.

Well, if we get it ported, we'll just have to see, I guess. It could be possible to implement a really simple fixed point 2x antialiasing routing in ASM that wouldn't be that much of a slowdown... but that'll be for after we get it ported.

 

[GP32 Kirby]

Well, I think the libraries we're looking at initially only support Flash 4 right now. But there's nothing much we can do about this short of writing our own Flash 5/6/7 support.

Also, the quality think (AFAIK) relates to how much antialiasing it does on the edges of the objects. Unfortunately, I doubt the GP32 is fast enough to run much of anything with any[.i] sort of software antialiasing. At the same time, the low screen resolution I think will make the lack of antialiasing more[.i] noticable, not less.

Well, if we get it ported, we'll just have to see, I guess. It could be possible to implement a really simple fixed point 2x antialiasing routing in ASM that wouldn't be that much of a slowdown... but that'll be for after we get it ported.

I hope Flash 5 will be supported sooner or later after initial release of the Flash player port (if it is possible to port), and also maybe there is a way to optimize the quality without making the playback speed movin' like a slug Here's hoping!

 

[woogal]

I think you'll be hoping for a long, long time. Last time I looked at the flash player for pocket pc it was barely useable, and that was an official product running on a faster system.