Machinarium, an award-winning indie point-and-click adventure/puzzle game in Adobe Flash and AIR.

A few months ago I met the guys from Amanita Design in Brno, Czech Republic. We talked about the success of Machinarium for desktop (available for Windows, Mac and Linux). That was just around the time the Adobe AIR 2.7 for iOS, Android and PlayBook was made available – and after some time the guys decided to port the game for tablets.

And today September 8th 2011, the game is available on the iOS App Store!
*Note: I will be releasing an article about the making/porting of Machinarium for tablets soon covering all the technical details.

Watch the trailer:

Interview with Jakub Dvorský (game designer and director):

Me: You have just released the new iPad version of Machinarium, but tell me something more about the history of Amanita Design and how you started building puzzle/adventure games?

Jakub: Amanita Design started in 2003 when I released a free web-game Samorost which was my thesis project at the Academy of Art. Even before that, I had created a couple of adventure games while studying at grammar school. Since then I have found several excellent collaborators so now the studio is nine men strong. We are still completely independent and self funded, and we still make adventure games. Of course we are also trying to push that genre somewhere to make our games more funny, entertaining and challenging at the same time.

[Screenshot from Samorost 2]

Me: Where does the original idea for Machinarium come from?

Jakub: First we knew, we wanted to create a full-length adventure game and that it should be a bit different and more complex than our previous Flash games. Then we came out with an idea of a robot as the main hero who lives in a robotic world. My first idea and vision of a strange vertical city populated by robots came to me about ten years ago when I was on an exchange scholarship in Netherlands. I was influenced by the modern functional architecture and the flatness of the country.

[Machinarium - sketches]

Me: How long did it take from the first sketches to the release?

Jakub: It took us almost three years. It’s a very long time and it wasn’t easy to stay focused on only one project all the time. Of course the whole game also changed significantly over that time. The basic concept was much simpler and our idea was to create longer but quite simple looking game. We thought it will take us about one year to finish it. In the end I’m really glad we spent all that time on it, because the game is now much better and more polished than what was intended in the initial plan and it definitely paid off.

[The artist's studio - Adolf Lachman]

Me: Why have you chosen Flash/AIR for the game?
Jakub: We have a long time relationship and lots of experience with Flash (since the Macromedia days). We don’t know any other tool for making such rich and interactive animations like Flash. And AIR was for us the only way how to get the game on iPad and other tablets in a relatively short time. Also we are looking forward to trying upcoming features of AIR 3.0 including Stage3D.

[Black Cap Brotherhood from Machinarium]

Me: What about the music and sound effects?

Jakub: The music and sound effects are very important in all of our projects so we do care about the whole audio side a lot. Our ‘in-house’ composer Tomas ‘Floex’ Dvorak (who created also Samorost2 OST) has worked almost one year on the score. The style could be generally described as electroacoustic music with elements of ambient, soundtrack and classical music. Tomas is very interested in the fusion of the acoustic and electronic fields, and it is also noticeable on this work. The same goes for sound effects which were all recorded and edited in our studio.

[Music by Tomas 'Floex' Dvorak, Sound design by Tomas 'Pif' Dvorak]

Me: Where can people get Machinarium?

Jakub: Machinarium is available for PC, Mac and Linux on our own website (machinarium.net) and it’s also on Steam and Mac App Store. The iPad2 version is available on iOS App Store and the Android version for tablets is coming soon as well. In addition to that we are also working hard on PS3 version which should be available later on PSN.

[Level design]

Me: Are you planning any other games at the moment?

Jakub: Yes, right now we are working on two projects – the first is a light-hearted and funny adventure game called Botanicula. It’s about five friends – little tree creatures who set out for a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites. The game itself is about exploration, solving little puzzles, meeting strange tree creatures and listening to the music. The other game is Samorost3 which is our main project. It will be our second full-length game and it will feature full HD graphics and a bit of a new approach to game design.

[Sketch of the five friends from Botanicula]

Last week at FITC, Lee Brimelow demoed Molehill running in AIR on a mobile platform (Android) for the first time. It seems like you guys liked it!

You guys will be able to leverage the Molehill APIs on mobile platforms for 2D and 3D rendering, for you guys who did not attend FITC, here is a little video demoing Molehill on Android through AIR. The same code is reused for the desktop version and then pushed to mobile :

Molehill - Tablet demo from Thibault Imbert on Vimeo.

This demo illustrates a common thing in 3D like cube map textures for reflections and is one of the demo from our test suite, so we have many little demos like this. I will be posting more complex examples soon!

If you are curious about the slides, you can download them here.

Here are some of the features we are working on :

- Faster GC : GC hint API and more.
- New numeric types : float and float4 (very useful for Molehill in the future).
- Concurrency : Worker threads (shared nothing model) to leverage multicore CPU's. No more UI 's blocked when doing expensive operations.
- Stage3D : The API used for Molehill (that you know through the Incubator builds).
- StageVideo : Allowing full GPU acceleration (decoding + blitting) when used with H.264. Part of Flash Player 10.2 and coming to AIR soon.
- Threaded video pipeline : Will decode non H.264 streams on another thread (H.264 being decoded by the GPU), Net I/O will also be moved to another thread, all this bringing smoother playback.

I will be covering some of those in more details later on, stay tuned!

Note : Note that the Incubator builds available in the Incubator program contain the features available in Flash Player 10.3.

Flash Player 10.3 will also be available in the future on mobile devices, we invite you to test the following features and let us know what you think through the Adobe Flash Player 10.3 beta forums:

Media Measurement – Measuring video just got easier. With Flash Player 10.3 and Adobe® SiteCatalyst®, developers can implement video analytics with as little as two lines of code for the first time.  Analytics solutions can use a new set of open APIs to easily implement consistent video analytics irrespective of implementation or delivery protocol.  Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played. For instance, using a very few lines of code you will be able to retrieve all the NetStream instances created in your applications, access any meta data (XMP) associated to media being played, and more through the NetDataEvent event. Make sure to check the NetMonitor API and the additions done to the NetStreamInfo API. We also improved the consistency over events dispatched by theNetStream API when dealing with progressive, HTTP or RTMP streaming. We also added helper APIs like pageDomain property on the Security object to expose domain of the current URL.

Acoustic Echo Cancellation – Flash Player 10.3 enables developers to create real-time online collaboration experiences with high-quality audio, such as telephony, in-game voice chat, and group conferencing applications. Developers can take advantage of acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection, and automatic compensation for various microphone input levels. End users will be able to experience higher quality audio facilitating smoother conversation flow, without using a headset. Make sure you check the newMicrophoneEnhancedOptions and Microphone.getEnhancedMicrophone() APIs.

In addition to acoustic echo removal, the following functionality will also be available through the MicrophoneEnhancedOptions API:

• Noise suppression - Remove ambient noise from microphone input.
• Automatic gain control - Compensate for level variation of microphone input (due to distance of speaker, etc.).
• Voice activity detection - Provides information whether speech/voice is detected.

Integration with browser privacy controls for managing local storage – Users will have a simpler way to clear local storage from the browser settings interface – similar to how users clear their browser cookies today. Flash Player 10.3 integrates control of local storage with the browser’s privacy settings in Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and higher, and future releases of Apple Safari and Google Chrome. See this related post we published in January.

Native Control Panel – The Global Settings Manager is currently a SWF residing on macromedia.com, Flash Player 10.3 provides users with streamlined controls for managing their Flash Player privacy, security and storage settings. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can access the Flash Player Settings Manager directly from the Control Panels or System Preferences on their computers. See this related post we published in January.

Auto-Update Notification for Mac OS – Flash Player 10.3 supports automatic notification of software updates on Mac OS, making it easier for Mac users to stay current with new capabilities in the latest version of Flash Player.

Now, you may be thinking, what! No 64-bit version! As we announced during the Flash Player "Square" program, 64-bit is coming for the next major version of the Flash Player, so please wait a little more time, I know it is painful, but this is for the good! Next major version will be killer

To download the beta release of Flash Player 10.3, visit Adobe Labs. We look forward to hearing your feedback, which will help us make Flash Player better for you. To log bugs about issues found in Flash Player 10.3 builds, please use the Adobe bugbase at bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer and select Flash Player 10.3 for the version.

• Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support – Flash Player takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.
• Stage Video hardware acceleration – A new method for video playback in Flash Player allows developers to leverage complete hardware acceleration of the video rendering pipeline, enabling best-in-class playback performance. Stage Video can decrease processor usage by up to 85% and enables higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality.
• Native custom mouse cursors – Developers can define custom native mouse cursors, enabling user experience enhancements and improving performance.
• Support for full screen mode with multiple monitors – Full screen content will remain in full-screen on secondary monitors, allowing users to watch full-screen content while working on another display.

Obviously, there is no much code I can show you regarding IE9 GPU compositing, the Flash Player does this automatically by leveraging the new GPU compositing APIs on IE9 to actually render the Flash Player frames as surfaces and push them on screen through Direct3D9 whatever wmode value you use. Note that graphics computing is still done by the CPU but we use GPU APIs to composite and blit the Flash Player frames on screen. It is similar to what we did in the past with CoreAnimation on MacOS with Safari. This will improve rendering performance on existent content without any modifications.

Concerning Stage Video, this feature has been sneaked at FOTB earlier this year and at Max last month by Tinic. We are very happy to announce that YouTube is already leveraging Stage Video. This will dramatically change the way video performs in Flash and bring native video performance on MacOS, Windows and Linux. For more infos about the YouTube work, check the Flash Player team's blog post.

To get an idea of how StageVideo performs, you can try the StageVideo enabled players here.
Make sure you are running it with Flash Player 10.2 beta.

I wrote a complete article on Devnet which goes into the details of StageVideo and wrote a very simple video player to illustrate how the StageVideo APIs work.

Here is a snaphost of the demo using Stage Video, playing the Big Buck Bunny movie in 1080p on my MacBook Pro :

For comparaison, here is a 720p video playing on YouTube, using about 40% of my MacBook Pro CPUs with Flash Player 10.1 :

Now, let's browse to same video with Flash Player 10.2 with Stage Video, CPUs usage drops to 9% :

Pretty cool, hu ? If you make the test on YouTube, make sure you wait a few seconds, some ActionScript logic in the YouTube player makes the CPU usage go wild for a few seconds before reaching its normal state.

For info, the performance improvements are way bigger if you overlay content on top of video. In some cases, CPU usage can drop from 200% to 10% using Stage Video, check my first post about Stage Video for more infos.

While listening to my track and browsing the web through another tab, the pause and resume feature introduced in Flash Player 10.1 stops rendering the frames and only decodes sound. Flash Player CPU usage then drops to 5% :

But that is not all, we added another nice feature related to cursors. A highly requested feature. The idea is simple, no more Mouse.hide() or onMouseMove handler or startDrag to have a custom cursor. You can now directly work at the OS level and assign your own custom native bitmap-based cursors. Here is a little code sample which illustrates the idea:

// we create a MouseCursorData object
var cursorData:MouseCursorData = new MouseCursorData();
// we specify the hotspot
cursorData.hotSpot = new Point(15,15);
// we pass the cursor bitmap to a BitmapData Vector
var bitmapDatas:Vector.<BitmapData> = new Vector.<BitmapData>(1, true);
// we create the bitmap cursor (bitmaps should not be bigger than 32x32 pixels, this is an OS limitation)
var bitmap:Bitmap = new zoomCursor();
// we pass it to the bitmapDatas vector
bitmapDatas[0] = bitmap.bitmapData;
// we assign the bitmap to the MouseCursor object
cursorData.data = bitmapDatas;
// we register the MouseCursorData to the Mouse with an alias
Mouse.registerCursor("myCursor", cursorData);
// whenever we neeed to show it, we pass the alias to the existing cursor property
Mouse.cursor = "myCursor";

Pretty cool? But wait, there is even better, you can also pass a series of BitmapData objects, then pass a specific frame rate and get automatic native animated cursor:

// we create a MouseCursorData object
var cursorData:MouseCursorData = new MouseCursorData();
// we specify the hotspot
cursorData.hotSpot = new Point(15,15);
// we pass the cursors bitmap to a BitmapData Vector
var bitmapDatas:Vector.<BitmapData> = new Vector.<BitmapData>(3, true);
// we create the bitmap cursor frames (bitmaps should not be bigger than 32x32 pixels, this is an OS limitation)
var frame1Bitmap:Bitmap = new frame1();
var frame2Bitmap:Bitmap = new frame2();
var frame3Bitmap:Bitmap = new frame3();
// we pass it to the bitmapDatas vector
bitmapDatas[0] = frame1Bitmap.bitmapData;
bitmapDatas[1] = frame2Bitmap.bitmapData;
bitmapDatas[2] = frame3Bitmap.bitmapData;
// we assign the bitmap to the MouseCursor object
cursorData.data = bitmapDatas;
// we register the MouseCursorData to the Mouse
Mouse.registerCursor("myAnimatedCursor", cursorData);
// we just pas a frame rate
cursorData.frameRate = 1;
// whenever we neeed to show it, we pass the alias to the existing cursor property
Mouse.cursor = "myAnimatedCursor";

Very simple, but so cool. Game and RIA developers will love this feature.

Another addition, we enhanced the full screen behavior by allowing one screen to stay full screen while working on the other screen. This feature was also highly requested by the community and video industry. Very nice feature for Hulu, YouTube and other video websites.

A lot of people expressed the need to actually detect if the current context allowed the SWF to go full screen. This would allow you to detect this at runtime and react appropriately. Departing from Flash Player 10.2, you will be able to use the allowFullscreen property on stage:

if ( !stage.allowFullScreen )
throw new Error ("Please use the allowFullScreen HTML tag.");

Finally, a little improvement regarding Flash Player version info in the context menu, Here is what you have today when right click, no way to know which exact version you have running :

Here is what you will get starting from 10.2 :

I agree, it was about time. But yes, way easier now

To use those new APIs you need to use the special build 18623 of the Flex SDK 4.5, from the Hero Stable Builds table here.
You also need to use a specific compiler argument –swf-version=11 to target SWF11.

I hope you guys will enjoy those features. Give it a try and let us know about bugs or any feedback you may have, thanks!

I am sure you guys have heard about what we just announced at the Max keynote this morning.

I am happy to share this with you guys

Molehill Introduction :

Another video from MaxRacer demoed at Max Keynote Day 1 built on top of Alternativa 8, leveraging the upcoming 3D Molehill APIs :

Tom demoes the Peer 2 Peer feature he developed for MaxRacer :

MAX Racer - 3D Flash Game with P2P Multiplayer from Tom Krcha on Vimeo.

Another one, with those beautiful islands, still with Molehill :

Another one from Frima Studio, who ported their engine used on the PSP for Zombie Tycoon to Molehill :

Another one from Away3D and EvoFlash using Molehill :

And again from Away3D :

For more details about implementation and how it works, check the Adobe labs Molehill page.

Update : For info, Molehill is also available in the browser, this is not limited to AIR or standalone player

Last Monday at "Flash on the Beach" keynote, I showcased new improvements we have been doing lately with video playback in the Flash Player.

So what happened ?

As you guys may know, we introduced earlier this year Flash Player 10.1 with H.264 GPU decoding on MacOS, Windows and Linux, which already highly improved the CPU usage when viewing H.264 video. But we are going further with dramatic CPU usage reduction in an upcoming version of the Flash Player.

Below is a snapshot of the Activity Monitor using Flash Player 10.1, playing a 1080p video with H.264 GPU decoding enabled :

You see that for such a video, CPU is still being used for about 50%, cause the CPU is not totally offloaded, still displaying and scaling the video frames.
Now in the following picture I am using the new feature we will be introducing soon, as you can see the CPU is highly offloaded and playing a 1080p video with around 8% CPU usage.

Note how the memory usage drops down too :

It gets even better when you start overlaying content on top of the video. Most of Flash websites use a lot of overlayed content on top of the video. In the snapshot below, the CPU usage goes pretty high, cause complex content is on top of my video, the CPU is working on compositing the video frames and the vector content in the display list which is an intensive task :

By leveraging the upcoming feature, take a look at my CPU usage and memory now, the exact same content with a few lines of code changed :

Again, this will dramatically improve the video performance in the Flash Player. Note that this feature will be available on Windows, MacOS and Linux, and this new improvement is not restricted to H.264 video or specific video cards vendors, any video frame whatever the codec used will benefit from this.

If you are interested into learning more about this, do not hesitate to meet us at Max.
If you want to try this as soon as possible, just drop me an email.

Hope you guys like it!

A few weeks ago I published a video demonstrating the amazing P2P features in AIR2.x, running on the desktop and on Android devices. Well I have been hard at work improving this application and making it robust enough to show here in India at the Flash Platform Summit.

The result is a pretty complex application that enables users to establish P2P video calls. I have used Google Maps in 3D mode and added Gesture support, Twitter for Authentication and a completely new API.

As promised, here is the source for you to download.  Remember that Tom Krcha is our P2P and FMS expert, so make sure that you keep up-to-date on his blog for more elaborate uses of P2P.

DOWNLOAD

If you are into 3d development for games, augmented reality or just interactive stuff like websites, you just can't miss the session entitled Flash Player 3D future scheduled for Max 2010 scheduled on October 27 at 11:00AM in room 503. Sebastian Marketsmueller (Flash Player engineer) will deep dive into the next generation 3D API coming in a future version of the Flash Player.

Now you may wonder, what does this means, what kind of 3D are we talking about ?

What kind of API ? True textured z-buffered triangles ? GPU acceleration ? Even better ? What I can say is forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big

When this will be available ?

We will share plans with you at Max during this session, I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.

If you are also curious about the inner details of the Flash Player renderer, Lee Thomason (Flash Player architect) will delve into the details of the Flash Player renderer, and show how to optimize the rendering performance of your applications. Lee will cover mechanisms like the display list, text rendering, shaders, GPU hardware acceleration, and exclusive features coming in a future version of Flash Player (hehe).

After this session, Flash Player rendering will no longer be a mystery for you. This track called Deep Dive into Flash Player Rendering is scheduled on October 27 at 09:30AM in room 511A.

I will be happy to meet you there at Max in Los Angeles and talk about our future plans and also get your feedbacks about the player around a fresh beer. I will post further details about all this in the following weeks.

If you haven't checked all the sessions available for Max this year check the online scheduler.