Locked by Moderator, Not on subject anymore,AIR Roadmap Update

[chris.campbell]

Hello AIR developers,

With the news today regarding Flash Player, I'm sure many of you have questions regarding AIR and its future roadmap.  Let me start by saying that today's announcement was not about AIR, and instead focuses entirely on Flash Player and the browser plugin environment.  Adobe remains committed to AIR and we believe it continues to be a great desktop and mobile development platform.

Many of you have asked for a roadmap update.  We hope to have our official Flash Runtime roadmap updated soon, but until then I wanted to share some of the features we'd like to accomplish in our upcoming releases.  As always, this list may change as we receive feedback from the community.

• Support for 64-bit AIR – Windows Captive Only
• AIR SDK installer on Windows
• Desktop async texture upload
• DirectX11 support for AIR desktop
• Increase the GPU memory texture limit
• Improved monitor and resolution settings for AIR Desktop
• GPU render mode for AIR Desktop
• Support for the latest SDK on iOS 11 and Android O
• ASTC Support for mobile
• VR/AR support for AIR apps
• ANE support for Swift on iOS
• METAL bindings for Stage3D
• Motion detection for Android devices

We've also been following a feature request thread on the Starling forums.  We wanted to get your feedback on some of the items outlined by the community.  If you'd like to provide additional input, please take a minute and take this three question survey so we can better understand what folks would like to see in future releases.

Community AIR Feature Requests​ Survey

[dews]

Problem is, ASWC is spouting - to quote a popular term - fake news.

What we can do today with AIR and the fact we're supported by relentless quarterly updates from Adobe makes this a fantastic choice for complex, demanding applications.  So, like they say, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts, so less from ASWC = better informed people.

[rewb0rn]

Tophermiller​ We have made great experiences converting our codebase from AS3 to Haxe to convert Flash to HTML5. The library OpenFL mirrors the Flash API so the code changes are kept to a minimum. Haxe and OpenFL also allow to export to .swf, so you can utilize the Flash Player or Air builds as long as you want, but you can also work on an HTML5 output. Haxe and AS3 are very similar and there are tools that help with the automated conversion. Here are more details about our conversion, in case you are interested:

Releasing a preview of our HTML5 clients – Haxe + Air = ❤️

The conversion takes some time of course, but if your company is making considerable revenue with the Flash product, they might want to invest a little more.

If that is no option for you, I think if you want your users to allow to download and install your game instead of using it in the browser, Air is the easiest solution and I differ with previous posts, I am convinced it will work long term (Win32 and Win64 builds have huge lifetimes, even if Adobe stops development).

[dews]

Seriously, can we not talk about FLASH - this is a thread about AIR - not FLASH.  zwetan_uk​ says it all.

[KramSurfer2]

Tophermiller  wrote

Thanks.   I don’t want to do future development, just want to preserve some work in AS3/Flash that took many years and millions of dollars to develop and is responsible for a lot of my company’s revenue.   Repackaging it as a desktop app in AIR might be the only way to save it past Dec 2020.

In THAT case.  Yes. Go the AIR route.  It's amazingly easy to target muiltiple outputs ( osX, Windows, Ios, Android ) and consistent across all platforms.

Would be nice if they added the windows store packager to the output list, but it's easy enough to export to a 'folder' which has the whole application and use the packager of your choice.

As stated above.  No long term guarantees from Adobe and even the AIR community has twindled dramatically in the past 5 years, so keep your eye on the best way to translate your way out of this runtime enviroment.  I kinda feel bad posting that last statement here, as it supports the collapse of AIR, but it's how I see it inevitably going with the way Adobe supports and Advertises there developement tools.  Which is all PhoneGap right now.

[rewb0rn]

That's a lot of words and posts to not add anything new to the discussion. Also, why do you even care what we think, I don't get it

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

I think that many like me have been following this thread and have been learning a lot with you all.

There are very interesting and not surprisingly conflicting points of view.

But please let's try to keep things respectful and towards the goal of this thread that is the roadmap update.

Besides commenting here, another way of helping is providing additional feedback by taking the survey that Chris suggested in the first comment.

Regards,

JC

[Douglas McCarroll]

> I think that many like me have been following this thread and have been learning a lot with you all.

> There are very interesting and not surprisingly conflicting points of view.

Yes. It's helpful to me to hear a range of opinions on this issue. Thanks to all for sharing your viewpoints.

I've especially appreciated posts about alternatives such as HAXE. It's good to, at least, have a backup plan. Hearing the experience of developers who have gone down the HAXE path is reassuring.

> But please let's try to keep things respectful

Yes. Sometimes when we become frustrated or irritated there's a natural urge to start putting others down. But if we resort to such attacks we really only lower ourselves.

> the goal of this thread that is the roadmap update

I'm sure that Adobe has good reasons for refraining from making specific commitments. Perhaps at some point they'll see their way clear to do so. Until they do, it's natural and appropriate for us to try to figure this out for ourselves. Opinions from both boosters and doubters are welcome.

Douglas

[rewb0rn]

Hey Douglas,

happy to see that it is helpful to you. If you want to know more about how we ported our grown AS3 codebase to Haxe and now use Haxe to deploy to HTML5 and Adobe Air targets, I have written down the story in my blog.

[ASWC]

Nice read, we pretty much did the same thing but translated directly our AS3 to typescript and now publish direct HTML5 games. We still have AIR apps that export to typescript for the web version. Having typescript versions makes developing further even easier since now we started offering PWAs as well. In term of performance and features HTML5 is still far behind AIR and Flash for us but in term of ease of development and ease of deployment our typescript versions really opened all the doors for us.