Adobe: Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2 for games

Adobe has released the final versions of Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2. The editor wants to now turn Flash Player into a games console for the Web.

Stamped version 11.2, the new major release of Flash Player brings with it a general performance improvement on all platforms thanks to multithreading for video encoding. This makes it possible to treat multiple processes simultaneously.

With the Windows operating system (from XP), a new update mechanism has been integrated. A Mac version is currently under development. Users can decided to automatically install updates in the future as soon as they are available, providing better computer security. The settings can be modified from the Windows Control Panel and the Flash Player settings manager.

The update can be made via Windows Task Scheduler, with the system checking every 24 hours whether an update to Flash Player is available. Adobe has decided to avoid running a background task for this. The update can be made through any web browser other than Google Chrome, as Flash Player is already integrated and therefore manages its own update.

It should be noted that Adobe isn’t promising that Flash Player updates will be completely silent. Users may be required to confirm the update if it is changing the default Flash Player settings. A corrective for a 0-day vulnerability could be applied without receiving confirmation from the end user though (if they have accepted to receive updates as a background task).


Orientation gaming
Flash Player 11.2 brings with it better mouse management, so that when you right click, depending on the are you will see different options. The limitations to the GPU’s 3D hardware acceleration (Stage 3D) have been reduced to allow the handling of video drivers dating back to the 1st of January 2008.

These improvements have been made by Adobe with the idea being to turn Flash Player into "a games console for the Web". In addition to this, Stage 3D has also appeared for iOS and Android with the launch of the AIR 3.2 execution environment.

Adobe also reminders users that they are working with Unity so that 3D Flash Player games can be published on the web via Unity 3.5 (3D games engine).

The release of Flash Player 11.2 marks the end of the line for Linux, with Adobe no longer releasing major versions for this platform. For the future major releases, Linux users will have to use Google Chrome for the moment (see our news).

Download Flash Player 11.2
Download AIR 3.2