PSP - Flash Player Info

**MaxManning** · August 15th, 2006, 01:05

Has anyone been making flash games for the PSP ?

What kind of framerate do you get with the homebrew flash player ?

The flash player that came with 2.71 upgrade is very slow, you really can't make any action based games because the framerate drops with just a few objects on the screen.

**10shu** · August 15th, 2006, 04:33

Yeah it slow...

Maybe the homebrew flash player run a little tiny bit faster...But the compatibility isn't as good as the sony one

Also the loading are really slow...Could be painfull when you try some test...

but...Give it a try

**mavsman4457** · August 15th, 2006, 04:37

I'm afraid you're just going to have to fall back on the solution for everything homebrew. Give it time. As painful as that is you know that someone is going to make a fast flash player or Sony will improve theirs and someone will emulate it on devhook.

**Video_freak** · August 15th, 2006, 06:11

Originally Posted by mavsman4457

As painful as that is you know that someone is going to make a fast flash player or Sony will improve theirs and someone will emulate it on devhook.

So true. How is that painful though.

**b8a** · August 15th, 2006, 07:51

Originally Posted by mavsman4457

I'm afraid you're just going to have to fall back on the solution for everything homebrew. Give it time. As painful as that is you know that someone is going to make a fast flash player or Sony will improve theirs and someone will emulate it on devhook.

It's not likely that we will ever have a better version of Flash than what Sony has already given us. The PSP just doesn't have the nessecary hardware for rendering complex to semi-complex vector graphics in real time.

I haven't tried this myself yet, but if you're looking to speed up your flash app, stay away from vector graphics as much as possible. Use small (filesize, that is), imported bitmap graphics, and that should help you achieve a decent frame rate. Just remember that even the most recent PC version of Flash isn't nessecarily suited for action games, so you may want to rethink the way you build your app altogeather.

Also keep in mind that the PSP Flash player has an approximate maximum frame rate of around 24fps under the best of circumstances, so your app may always seem on the slow side no matter how much you tone it down or optomize it.

**MaxManning** · August 16th, 2006, 00:52

PC version of flash can definitely do action games just fine. I just find it odd that I seem to get a better framerate on a cell phone with Flash Lite.

I'm sure there has to be optimizations that can be done to improve the performance of this flash player. The PSP is no PC, but I gotta believe that it's capable of more than what the current player is doing.

Vector graphics don't seem to be much of a problem unless you are rotating or scaling them. Fonts are actually a pretty significant hit.

Another tip for anyone else that might be interested is that if you have any movieclips that are not visible, they are still taking up processing time. Basically you have to set the movieclip to a blank frame, otherwise it still spends cycles on it.

**IndianCheese** · August 16th, 2006, 03:57

It wouldbe great if the PSP was officially clocked up to 333mhz when a Flash Movie was being displayed and dropped back down when it wasn't.

**b8a** · August 16th, 2006, 11:35

Originally Posted by MaxManning

PC version of flash can definitely do action games just fine. I just find it odd that I seem to get a better framerate on a cell phone with Flash Lite.

I'm sure there has to be optimizations that can be done to improve the performance of this flash player. The PSP is no PC, but I gotta believe that it's capable of more than what the current player is doing.

Vector graphics don't seem to be much of a problem unless you are rotating or scaling them. Fonts are actually a pretty significant hit.

You can get a better framerate with Flash Lite because it's exactly what it's name says -- "Lite". I appologize if you already know this, but they've been continually building on top of the code base for Flash, they haven't been rewriting it with each release. Which means that each version is capable of doing anything the previous version could, and in addition it has extra code "bloating" it. Flash Lite approximately corresponds to Flash 4, which, while it didn't have as mature of a programming API, was notably faster than and (with the right coding) just as capable as 5 and 6. Most people don't notice the speed drop in the successive versions because in many cases their PC's speed had increased in the meantime, compensating for the drop in the flash player speed.

I don't know what I can say to convince you, but I firmly believe that the PSP's Flash performance is as good as we're going to get. 71M, the author of the first PSP Flash player, flatly stated that the PSP doesn't have sufficient memory for optimal playback, and the fact that his player wasn't significantly slower than Sony's convinces me that his opinion is credible. Sony may have intentionally crippled some of the Flash player's abilities so that it wouldn't be able to compete with commercial games, but I do think the speed issue is legitimately constrained by the physical limitations of the PSP.

Also, while I haven't specifically tested bitmaps vs. vectors yet, I can confirm that the PSP Flash player deffinately does take a hit with vectors. The first thing I did with the player was subject it to a series of test files that I keep on hand, and there was a deffinate speed drop correlating to the number/complexity of on-screen vector graphics.

**MaxManning** · August 16th, 2006, 12:30

That's good info, I can definitely see how the memory could "the" issue in all of this.

Bitmaps vs Vectors is definitely faster, but the real hit seems to come when you rotate or scale a vector. I'm sure the complexity of the vectors factor into this as well - as you noted. I was using circles for my test.

So, if you have 10 bitmaps or 10 vectors with no rotating and scaling going on, the bitmaps will perform slightly faster. But since you are never gonna have more than 4 objects on screen - cause it's too damn slow either way -- it's kind of moot.

I think that if memory is the main issue, it would be worthwhile to shoot for an abbreviated version of Flash -- like Flash Lite.

You are probably correct that Sony might not want a "game capable" version of flash on their PSP. Maybe only a version that is capable of making User Interfaces for web pages and other apps that don't require a high framerate.