Projects/Flash Gamedev

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Welcome to the Flash as a Gaming/Edu-Gaming Platform for the XO-1 project

Project members:

XO-1 as a Target Platform for Flash Gamedev

The XO-1 looks very promising as a Flash development target platform.

With regards to performance as a Flash dev platform, it is pretty similar to a desktop with an AMD K6-2 450MHz CPU, 256MB RAM + Win98 and pretty similar to Flash Lite devices in that it is limited in CPU and Memory compared to most modern computers.

We tried Gnash, but

  • The default installed Gnash has no sound (because Flash uses MP3s for sound and the default shipped Gnash comes compiled with MP3 libraries because of FOSS licensing restrictions)
  • Gnash renders some AVM1 Actionscript 1.0/2.0 (Flash 8 & belpw) content wrong
  • Gnash does not emulate the AVM2 (Actionscript Virtual Machine 2) found in Flash 9 and above, thus not making it a good platform for Flash dev, especially FOSS flash dev -- the only *decent* production-level tools for FOSS flash dev requires using Actionscript 3 and only outputs Flash 9 AVM2 content.

That being said, we installed the Adobe Flash plugin, and it ran pretty good on the XO with OS Build 711.

And, when we installed Opera 9.52 (desktop version runs w/o a hitch on the XO aside from needing to launch it from the terminal), it ran even better -- Flash performance in Opera is much better than in the XO's default Browser.

Opera therefore, is the ideal browser to do Flash content on for the XO-1. (or perhaps Firefox 3? Still need to test out FF3).

Anyway, this looks really good environment for Flash as a dev environment because of Flash's small CPU & memory footprint.

Because of the limited CPU & memory, application development methods will be very similar to producing content for Flash Lite which runs on devices with limited CPU & Memory.

During testing, Flash Lite 2.0 (which is based on Flash 7) content ran pretty good on the XO -- performance was very similar to 330MHz Nokia S60 phones with the Adobe Flash Lite 2.0 player.

What's needed:

  • A new Activity icon that does not conflict with the XO's Rainbow security
  • An Activity icon to launch the browser with specific local html as the default content as a method for launching flash apps.


Official Adobe Flash Browser Plugin

Users may want to install the Adobe Flash browser plugin instead of Gnash which is packaged by default.

Direct link to the latest version of Flash 9:

Direct link to the latest version of Flash 10.0 r12 beta:

Adobe Flash on Opera

Also, Flash runs significantly faster on the Opera browser instead of XO-1's default Browse activity.

Direct links to the latest stable version of Opera (9.52)

OLPC Skin for Opera:

Opera 9.52 has to be run from the terminal. Open up the terminal then type 'opera'

General Installation

Installing by .rpm file

Open your terminal activity on the Activity panel below your Sugar desktop or press Ctrl+0

Type in: 

su
wget <url of rpm file to be downloaded>
rpm -vi <rpm file>
exit

Relevant links

Adobe Flash player plugin on OLPC XO-1:

Gnash on the OLPC XO-1:

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