A new point release in the 0.4.4 series has been released yes­ter­day (0.4.4.3). There are not many effects vis­i­ble to end users, beside a small fix to restore YouTube com­pat­i­bil­ity. Under the hood much work has been done to sup­port pol­icy files one of the secu­rity ori­ented fea­tures of the flash platform.

Although we still miss some stuff (e.g. Text), the Advanced Graph­ics Engine is able to ren­der gradients

I’d also like to give some insight about what is going on the advanced graph­ics engine branch. The roadmap is being walked with­out major issues. Now the tex­ture real estate for graph­ics ele­ments is allo­cated from a sin­gle large tex­ture, geome­tries are drawn asyn­chro­nously using cairo on the CPU side and the result­ing raster data is uploaded to the right chunks of tex­ture using PBO based trans­fers that are (hope­fully, this is depen­dent of the OpenGL imple­men­ta­tion) han­dled through DMA by the graph­ics card.

The new engine is not yet on fea­ture par­ity with the old one, but to show­case the new pos­si­bil­i­ties i’ve added sup­port for color gra­di­ents. It’s also inter­est­ing to note that, after the first rough mea­sure­ments, the new engine is fairly faster than the pre­vi­ous one.

YouTube video sample

Another advan­tage of the new design is that OpenGL code will be pretty much con­densed in a few loca­tions. More­over, it will be used only for accel­er­ated blit­ting, com­posit­ing and upload of data to video mem­ory. This opens new inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for other graph­ics backends.

As a clos­ing news on Fri­day I had the first chance to phys­i­cally meet another mem­ber of the lightspark com­mu­nity, namely our Debian pack­ager Didier Raboud, as we dis­cov­ered we are both work­ing at EPFL. It has been a nice coffee-based meet­ing and we had a change to shake hands and dis­cuss about some long term plans for the project.