Multi-threaded Flash + H&G + ??? = Profit! news

By Reto.Vashu, Flash Programmer

While we are developing our game, the world is changing. Change is coming to the Flash Player Plug-in as well and sometimes this change is something we’ve been waiting for!

So how will this affect Heroes & Generals? Read more to find out!

Multi-threading or worker (Adobe name for a thread), a long time requested feature has been revealed for release in the second half of 2012 by Adobe, it will appear in what is called “Flash Player Dolores” (See Adobe Roadmap for Flash Player)

So what exactly does this mean for Heroes & Generals?

Getting multiple workers to render / process the information and content means a lot in modern games and applications and this especially applies to our Flash Solution. There will be 3 areas (at least) that will benefit greatly from workers in our project:

Three areas that will benefit from Multi-threading / Workers

Area 1. The Campaign Map
The campaign map handles all the map tiles, the fire effects from battles, searching for assault teams / Cities and moving assault teams around the map. This will be offloaded to not influence other areas of the flash solution. This is the biggest optimization to the application.

Area 2. Chat
Another area that is heavily influenced by the lack of multiple workers is the chat area. When a lot of users are chatting and the war-map is doing what it does best, then this area is heavily choked up. Offloading this it’s own will make it smooth as a baby’s bum.

Area 3. Interface Responsiveness in general
With a third worker we can improve and keep a constant responsiveness for the user interface in general.

So does this worker thing really work?

One of Adobe’s leading engineers have posted the following video in his walk through of how it’s most likely going to work with workers in Flash Player

Below you can see the video of how workers change the responsiveness of Flash:

Highlights of the Video:

00:30: Handling expensive processes in the current Flash Player
00:54: Handling expensive processes in the new version of Flash Player
01:32: Punchline of Video

So will my computer explode when you get workers implemented?

Short answer is, no.

Slightly longer is, we will continue to monitor our memory and CPU usage and keep it at a proper level! With the workers and the improved profiling in Dolores, we will be able to easily find our memory leaks and poorly optimized areas and improve upon them to ensure a great experience for as many as possible!

Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed reading about what’s coming up in the next half year for both Flash Player and Heroes & Generals.