Flash Player 11.4 Makes Possible Even More Powerful Games in Flash

Adobe has been churning out Flash Player updates at a regular pace and the latest major one is Flash 11.4, now available along with AIR 3.4. Adobe is focusing on HTML5 and modern web technologies lately, but Flash is still huge and it still has a future.

In Adobe's eyes, and who's to blame them, the future of Flash is for heavy-duty apps and that mostly means games. WebGL is growing strong and HTML5 Canvas along with a growing number of JavaScript platforms for games are good but not great, you can make games with them but it's either harder or the results are poorer quality.

For developers interested in porting their games as fast as possible and using a stable and tested platform, Flash is the way to go.

Especially since Adobe has been doubling down on advanced technologies, like full 3D hardware acceleration and more recently premium, paid features, which enable developers to convert existing C++ code and have it run inside a Flash app.

Updates to Flash Player 11.4 are in the same vein. For example, developers can now use ActionScript Concurrency, that is to say ActionScript workers, to push certain tasks to the background.

This means intensive but not crucial tasks can work in the background while the more important ones, that require responsiveness, still run smooth.

If you're thinking that this would be great in games, that's exactly what Adobe had in mind too. Having the UI responsive at any point in a game is crucial and that's now possible with Flash and AIR. It also means apps will be able to leverage multi-core processors better.

What's more, the hardware accelerated 3D APIs in Flash now work with a lot more devices. Stage3D now runs on an even greater variety of hardware. Crucially, it also works with underpowered embedded Intel graphic chips, albeit in a special Stage3D constrained mode.

Adobe boasts that Flash 11.2 and above have been installed by 400 million people and, thanks to background updates, the vast majority of those will get updated to Flash 11.4 and future versions automatically.