Ben Garney

"Unfortunately the labs are not recorded. We will be releasing the lab material as part of the platformer kit, though." - Ben Garney

"Are we talking the glut tesselator (http://glprogramming.com/red...) or a custom extension/tesselation routine?" - Ben Garney

"Sure, that is also an option. :) You will notice that their actual renderer is running in C on the device, though, so I don't think I was being too misleading. ;) Cool game. Kind of gorey. :P We'll see what comes out on the iPhone. We're more web oriented than device oriented, but we are always looking for cool projects. :)" - Ben Garney

"Thanks, Matt! (For the compliment and the tweet. :)" - Ben Garney

"Didn't post this in my reply lower down but I agree on the CPU thing. Desktop has ~1mb or better cache with prefetch. iPhone has 256kb cache at best, and 16kb at worst, and unclear what prefetch strategy it has. In addition, there is less and slower RAM. Rough estimate puts the iPhone RAM at something like 1/10th the speed of desktop RAM. Software rasterization has to have big fast cache and fast RAM to be manageable (that's one big reason why GPU is fast), so even though on MHz it looks like about a 5x gap between desktop 3ghz chip and iPhone CPU, it can actually be much worse depending on workload. I know the haters will interpret this as "omg ben is blaming iphone for his performance woes," but they have bad reading comprehension skills. There is a real, measurable difference between desktop and iPhone hardware, and you have to be very careful to get solid performance out of the iPhone." - Ben Garney

"One of my main points was that the performance issues are Adobe's fault in the sense that at the time I needed to put the app on the store for them to demo it, the hw support wasn't in. I am waiting for Adobe's SDK to stabilize a bit before I ship, but I have a version of Trading Stuff running on my phone right now that runs great. The iPhone hardware is great. It's a fantastic phone, with good GPU, decent CPU, and great build quality. I'm very happy Adobe is taking advantage of its capabilities, and I want to stress it is entirely possible to build good apps with their tech. I'm sorry you dislike Adobe's UI decisions, but I don't think that that reflects on the quality of their Flash port." - Ben Garney

"Hey Ben - awesome to know you're a reader. :) All this iPhone stuff is in Flash CS5, so when it's out you can be your very own iPhone developer. :)" - Ben Garney

"Actually, they are looking at multiple hardware backends - they certainly have them for the other 19 mobile platforms they target. You're right that the current HW support on iPhone is simply better compositing, but that goes a long way - and in fact I, personally, don't even use the vector renderer on the _desktop_, so it's all I need. Most ObjC 3d apps use HW as a fast blitter, too - look at Popcap's games for instance. Using the GL tesselator in any serious application is like showing up to a drag race in a VW bug - you're gonna get laughed off the track. One of the big reasons Flash is popular with artists is that it offers 100% consistent quality/appearance across platforms. They don't care that much about speed; they want it to accurately reflect their design down to the pixel. My sense is that if Flash violated that promise, they would lose massive market share amongst artists. So they are stuck (to a certain degree) with the software rasterizer. On higher end devices (with..." - Ben Garney

"Thanks, Louis - I appreciate your excellent write up. :) (See reply further down for my thoughts on this thread.)" - Ben Garney

"No problem. I totally understand the lure of reverse engineering things, and I'm a little flattered you chose my app. :) Thanks for the link on your blog!" - Ben Garney

"I am on Windows XP. No idea what the specifics are on Vista." - Ben Garney

"Personally, I would prefer C# among the three of them. It has the biggest dev community and the best tools. It is the most mature. AS3 is doing ok, but has some growing up to do. HaXe has poor tool support and weird syntax, but great language features." - Ben Garney