Release notes | Developer | Flash Player 11.2, AIR 3.2

Current Runtime Release Version(s)
New Features
Security enhancements
Fixed Issues
Known Issues
Authoring for Flash Player 11.2
Authoring for AIR 3.2
System Requirements
Reporting Issues
Runtime Version History

May 4th, 2012. Welcome to Adobe® Flash® Player 11.2 and Adobe® AIR® 3.2! This release includes bug fixes related to stability and performance

• Flash Player Desktop: 11.2.202.235
• Flash Player Android 4.0: 11.1.115.8
• Flash Player Android 2.x,3.x: 11.1.111.9

• Stage3D for Adobe AIR (mobile)

Enables full GPU acceleration for iOS and Android using the same Stage3D APIs you are using today on the desktop. For more details about this feature, visit Adobe Gaming website: http://gaming.adobe.com/getstarted/

• Silent auto update for Windows

Flash Player 11.2 introduces silent auto update on Windows. This provides a smoother experience when users update to the latest Flash Player version.

Adobe Flash Player Desktop 11.2.202.235, Flash Player Android 4.0: 11.1.115.9 and Flash Player Android 2.x,3.x: 11.1.111.8 includes security fixes described in Security Bulletin APSB12-09

N/A

Flash Player Desktop

• Windows: Long animation pauses when a mouse or keyboard is used with Steam overlay(3089755)
• Mac OS: The mouse cursor does not change to hand pointer when mousing over TLF links(3060839)
• Mac OS: Adobe AIR crashes with late model Apple computers running 10.7.2 (check workaround here)
• MouseLock and FullscreenSourceRect does not update the display when in fullscreen(3006724)

Flash Player Android

• 
  Seeking while video is paused does not update the frame on Android 4.0 devices(2995454)
• StageVideo using On2 and Sorenson does not work on Android 4.0 devices(3053819)
• After disposing a context3D and requesting a new one, or returning to application from background the new context3D will render black for few frames(3019048)

To use the new Flash Player, you will need to target SWF version 15 by passing in an extra compiler argument to the Flex compiler: -swf-version=15. Directions are below.

If you are using the Adobe Flex SDK:

• Download the new playerglobal.swc for Flash Player 11.2
  
• Download Flex 4.5.1 SDK (4.5.1.21328) from the Flex 4.5 SDK table.
  
• Install the build in your development environment
  
• In Flash Builder, create a new ActionScript project: File -> New -> ActionScript project.
  
• Open the project Properties panel (right-click and chose 'Properties'). Select ActionScriptCompiler from the list on the left.
  
• Use the 'Configure Flex SDK's' option in the upper right hand corner to point the project to Flex build 21328. Click ok.
  
• Configure your project to target SWF version 15
  
• Open the project Properties panel (right-click and chose 'Properties'). Select ActionScriptCompiler from the list on the left.
  
• Add to the 'Additional compiler arguments' input: -swf-version=15. This ensures the outputted SWF targets SWF version 15. If you compile on the command-line and not in Flash Builder, you need to add the same compiler argument.
  
• Ensure you have installed the new Flash Player 11.2 build in your browser.

Update to the AIR 3.2 namespace.

You must update your application descriptor file to the 3.2 namespace in order to access the new AIR 3.2 APIs and behavior. If your application does not require the new AIR 3.2 APIs and behavior, you are not required to update the namespace. However, we recommend all users start using the AIR 3.2 namespace even if you are not yet taking advantage of the new 3.2 capabilities. To update the namespace change the xmlns attribute in your application descriptor to

Stage 3D Mobile Guidelines

Stage3D Mobile-specific Authoring Guidelines

• Make sure direct is specified in the application descriptor.
• Make sure namespace is set to 3.2 in your application descriptor.
• Swf-version needs to be set to SWF-version 15. You can use http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/908/cpsid_90810.html as reference for setting up your Flash Professional CS 5.5 with appropriate swf version
• For Flash Builder, add -swf-version=15 in the compiler setting of your project.
• For Android applications, in your application descriptor file, you should make sure that is not set if you do not plan to use the camera.
  This can be done by either commenting out the line in android manifest section of the application descriptor or removing the line.

When android.permission.CAMERA is requested, applications have to composite their screen with a potential camera image every frame, even if a camera is not actually in use.This will impact performance significantly.

A new application descriptor tag has been introduced, default value is false. If your content uses a depth or stencil buffer then you must include this element with a value of true in your applicationDescriptor.xml file for the content to render properly. If you are creating 3D content, it is very likely that you need to specify this element.If depthAndStencil is not set to true in your application descriptor file, you will get an error if you try to configure your backbuffer with depth and stencil.Not enabling the depth and stencil buffers can boost performance on Imagination tech gpu based devices (including all iOS devices).2D content should not specify this flag in the application descriptor unless it really needs to use the stencil or depth buffers. Please note that in order to see the error that will be thrown for a mismatch between this app descriptor flag and what the content might try to use in context3D.configureBackBuffer(), the author must set Context3D.enableErrorChecking to true.

application descriptor Example: content that uses depth or stencil buffer

• Applications need to handle device loss.   Device loss occurs when the underlying gpu rendering context becomes unavailable to the application. The easiest ways to trigger device loss are to hit control+alt+delete on a Windows machine, or rotate an Android device while running an AIR app whose app descriptor includes <autoOrients>true</autoOrients>.   You may experience device loss after navigating away from an application and then coming back to it.  For testing purposes, you can also explicitly call context3D.dispose() to trigger device loss.   In all of these cases, the underlying gpu context must be recreated and all your existing gpu resources become invalid. Event.CONTEXT3D_CREATE will be fired when device loss occurs. The application should handle this event by re-uploading textures and reconstructing vertex and index buffers.   This will allow the application to resume rendering with texture, vertex, and index buffer objects that are valid for the new gpu context.

•  Fragment shaders now use mediump precision math.  This is a change from previous drops where highp precision was used.   Vertex shaders still use highp precision. The reduction in precision means that fragment shaders dealing with values outside of the mediump range can possibly overflow the available bits in the registers.  Register overflow will cause rendering errors.  Depending on the chipset, you may effectively get data precision higher than mediump, but you can not count on it.  Authors must ensure that data manipulated by fragment shaders does not exceed the mediump data range to avoid errors.  Be especially careful when computing texture coordinates in the fragment shader.
  • Highp supports floating point values in the range of --2^62 to 2^62 and integer values in the range of --2^16 to 2^16
  • Mediump supports floating point values in the range of --2^14 to 2^14 and integer values in the range of --2^10 to 2^10

• The overlaying of normal Stage content on top of Stage3D has been optimized by combining all rendering into a single pass.   The Stage plane now updates synchronously with the Stage3D plane.   Synchronous updates mean that if you are using normal DisplayObjects overlayed on top of Stage3D content, then neither the Stage nor the Stage3D content will update on screen until you call Context3D.present().     Note that whenever a Context3D is present, normal stage based animation will not happen at all (no device text input, no timeline animation, etc)  until you  either call Context3D.present(), dispose the Context3D, or set the stage3D.visible property to false.   Should an actionscript error be thrown, you will need to catch it and perform one of these options, otherwise all screen updates will stop and the content will appear to freeze.
  

Stage3D Mobile Performance Guidelines

General

• ImaginationTech chips use a slow transfer mode when uploading a bitmap to a gpu texture whenever the bitmap's dimensions are not a power of 2 or not divisible by 8.   The bitmap's dimensions should be taken into account when creating textures.
•  Lots of alpha blending has been found to be slow on several gpus.  Use alpha blending sparingly
• A large bitmap used as a background image can be much slower than tiling the background with several smaller bitmaps.
• Avoid frequent updates of Display List (2D) based Performance statistics.  Updating 2D content with Stage3D content at high frame rates impacts performance. The frequency of 2D updates should be at least 100 times less than the Stage3D content frame rate. You can also consider defering the 2D updates until end of the test, or decrease the frequency of performance status updates.
• Disable automatic stage orientation by including <autoOrients>false</autoOrients> in your application descriptor, unless it is required by your application. Automatic stage orientation will cause device loss and this can lead to a slight pause and screen flicker when rotating Android devices. Instead, consider handling device reorientation in your application logic.
• When measuring performance, you should package a release mode swf into apk or ipa files. Using a debug mode swf may add additional overhead impacting performance.
• When measuring performance, also make sure Context3D.enableErrorChecking is set to false. Enabling error checking will impact performance negatively.

Android

• On Tegra2 based devices (Such as Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Xoom), setting colorDepth of the application to 16bit greatly improves the performance. See http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/build/WSfffb011ac560372f-5d0f4f25128cc9cd0cb 7ffc.html#WS54ddc2cc39d08a621542610c132b1bbd829-8000 for more details on how to set colorDepth in your application.

iOS

• When measuring performance on iOS, please make sure the app is compiled as -ipa-appstore or exported to release build so the resulting ipa is optimized.

ActionScript

• Avoid using for in, and for each loops for array iteration. Use for loop using index into array.
• On iOS, accessing vector object requiring calculation of index during the array referencing has slight performance hit. Avoid this if possible. For example, with something like vec1[3 + 4]  you should use vec1[7].
• Minimize the number of objects being allocated. Try to reuse objects as much as possible. For more details. Check the Object Pooling section (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/mobile/WS948100b6829bd5a6-19cd3c2412513c24bce-8000.html) from the Optimizing Performance for the Adobe Flash Platform document

For current Flash Player system requirements, visit http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/

For current AIR system requirements, visit http://www.adobe.com/products/air/systemreqs/

For Flash Access system requirements (client and server), visit http://www.adobe.com/products/flashaccess/systemreqs/

Flash Player 11.2 has the following minimum system requirements:

Note:

As of Flash Player 11.2, Adobe will not support backports to Flash Player 10.3 for Internet Explorer 6

AIR 3.2 has the following minimum system requirements:

Found a bug? Please submit a bug to the Flash Player and Adobe AIR bug database.

Flash Player and AIR may leverage your graphics hardware to decode and play H.264 video. There may be video issues that can only be reproduced with your particular graphics hardware and driver. When reporting an issue involving video, it is essential to note your graphics hardware and driver, along with your operating system and browser (when using Flash Player), so that we can reproduce and investigate issues. Please be sure to include this information as described in Instructions for Reporting Video Playback Issues. Note: Due to the high volume of email we receive, we are unable to respond to every request.

Thank you for using Adobe Flash Player and AIR and for taking the time to send us your feedback!