Previous flash games did not use GPUs?

Haxe
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Previous flash games did not use GPUs?
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2

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Recently downloaded several ‘flash games’
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It was found that no “GPU” was used
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Did previous “flash” games not use “GPU” to optimize performance?
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3

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Is it because “starling” appeared relatively late?
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It seems that “flash games” before “2012” did not support using “GPU” to optimize performance
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Correct. Most Flash games did not use the GPU. The traditional display list in Flash is not hardware accelerated. Even after Stage 3D was introduced, many people continued to use the traditional display list because it had always been fast enough for their needs.

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Hello, may I ask

After the release of ‘Starling’

Have Flash developers abandoned traditional AS3? Do they all use ‘starling’?

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Once I started using Starling, most of my projects that followed, used it. I wouldn’t say I “abandoned” traditional AS3 (I assume you mean the transitional Flash/AIR API display list). Starling just sits on top of it and many of the Flash/AIR API features are still necessary.

Starling has its limitations, and its use cases. I still don’t use it for everything, just the things that overwhelmingly benefit from its use.

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Starling has its limitations？
What？

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Starling primarily focuses on using 2D sprites for images and animations, and it does this very well.

If you’re working heavily with 3D, or vector, or involved menu systems, or webcam/video (depending on target), or a lean web-app, then it may not be beneficial.

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The main goal is “html5 windows exe”
What are the restrictions?

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As a principle, test early to identify issues and limitations.

Without knowing what it is you’re trying to do, my time isn’t well spent trying to simply assume a lot of things that may or may not be applicable.

11

Early flash games were not using GPU. Initially back in flash4 as1 there was no movieclip, just graphic, button and textfield.
This is really interesting comparing MovieClip and Graphic.

Code was all done on timeline frames and really smart creatives could often make visual interaction better than serious coders that had no understanding of timing, animation and visual graphics or art. Flash very much allowed people with some tech savy and artistic talent to excel, modern day you have a designer and an engineering developer and hope they will work well together rather than unicorns or blending talented creatives.
Movieclips were heavy and graphics in early flash were lighter and in more modern flash like as3 Sprites that were less dynamic were used.
Now in Starling a Quad can be used for an image. The difference between as1/2 and as3 was mostly that as3 was serious OOP but also as3 was not well integrated to the flash timeline or not that well, it was no longer a tool the creative could play with in the same way. But with BitmapData it was possible to sample timeline and use it with GPU. So when starling appeared and real applications were required via air, as by now or soon the browser was killed for flash… CPU with flash was great at SVG/graphics shape rendering and so the old timeline stuff was not forgotten, but that was transfered as a bitmap to be rendered by starling to a shader.
Starling is good at rendering images it is just a framework for GPU, but to do vector graphics often it is simpler to do them off screen on the CPU to bitmap and use them. Starling makes GPU use simpler, drawing vectors well with GPU is hard so it may work better to do them with CPU and then render with GPU. It is a complex space that is always changing.

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The certainly was a simplicity to dropping code onto symbols in Flash, and working with it in a much more visual way. On a simple project, that’s fine.

However, once your project starts to get more complex, having code buried within different symbols, at different levels becomes a nightmare, and on top of that, having multiple developers trying to work on a project simultaneously. The simplicity of that method ceases to be cute anymore.

ActionScript 1/2 were accessible, simple and effective for small projects. Today’s equivalent is Scratch (for children).
ActionScript 3 is powerful and can scale for teams of developers.

The ActionScript 3 language was also stricter, improving debugging and type safety, and more consistent.

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13

Blink I half agree, with organization fairly large projects were made in all versions of flash! The problem with as3 was that it disconnected in many ways from the timeline, and as2 was like broken oop, so in some ways as1 was lovely to use and as3 was great but it opened a divide between devs and designers. Flash was very cool in for a short while allowing a large cross over of talent between artists, musicians, coders, designers, print designers, scientists, etc..
I think as1 was far above scratch in what was made and used in the real world at the time, after all flash effectively killed Director.

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14

I almost could say in retrospect that with flash my fav languages are haxe and actionscript1, as2 and as3 were not as clean as haxe, and as1 was more like JS or older JS.

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