Air 3.3 beta PC audio distortion / Air 3.1 / 3.2 Mac black screen issue

[JaperSuperflatGames]

Hi there,

I've recently released a large game coded in Flash Builder with Air (www.lonesurvivor.co.uk), and I used Air 3's captive runtime feature to bundle it for Mac and PC.

The initial build used Air 3.2 and for a large proportion of OSX users, there were no visuals at all, just sound and the game obviously working underneath.  This caused a very large support issue, and took several weeks to deal with, as well as having to maintain a seperate Projector version for those for whom the Air version wouldn't work.  I wish I had known that the game would fail on some Macs, but unfortunately the issue showed up on none of the ones tested.

I'm about to launch the updated build of the game which uses Air 3.3 beta 1, as it seems to fix the black screen issue for all those who experienced it.  I was very happy that Adobe have managed to iron this out, even if there was no response to the bug I entered into bugbase.

The problem is, on a final test on XP SP2, the 3.3 beta version produces what appears to be filtered graphics... which is how the Mac version has always appeared, but the PC version of the game seemed to use what looked like nearest-neighbour sampling in Flash's fulllscreen upscaling, which looked good for the zoomed pixel art in this game. 

This is a small cosmetic issue, but there is another one whhich is far more severe - the audio has become extremely distorted, and is now unlistenable.

So with 3.2 giving me no visual on Macs and 3.3 giving me unlistenable audio on PCs, I will now have to maintain two versions again.  I really would like to keep one project I can quickly make changes to, but the seperate problems in different platforms means I lose out on the great cross-platform functionality of Air.  I'm hoping this is a known issue, but I couldn't find it on google / bugbase / these forums. 

Could these two issues be related - is hardware acceleration not working or something?  Somehow I think it is, because the XP test machine is quite old, and tended to fall over with the game running in software mode in a Flash projector.

I tried swapping out the Air 3.3 runtime for the previous 3.2 I shipped with, and editing the XML desciption to make sure it was set to use that and, sure enough, the game worked as it did before.  So there is definitely something up with the beta.  I'm just glad I caught this problem before I shipped as going to save me thousands of emails of support!

So I guess my question is - is this a known issue?  And if so, do you have any workarounds / or are Adobe working on a fix?

[chris.campbell]

I'm sorry your previous bug was not addressed.  A couple of things I'd like to try.  First, we just released Beta 2 of AIR 3.3.  Would you mind giving it a try to see if the audio problem is still there?  Second, I'd like to get you into our prerelease program if you're interested.  Please send your contact info to ccampbel@adobe.com and I'll work on getting you in.  Finally, would it be possible to get a copy of your game so I can test it out internally?  If I can reproduce the problem, I'll add a bug internally (though I do recommend opening another external bug.)

Thanks,
Chris

[JaperSuperflatGames]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the prompt response - I guess I should have tried the forums instead of the bugbase last time...  It really was a support nightmare!  Not least because I had to deal with the problem of saved games being wiped by over-zealous browsers on the backup Projector version I was supplying Mac customers with.

Fortunately the Mac Air 3.3 runtime works great. 

Out of interest - there is still the difference in GPU scaling used between Mac and Windows though, which there always has been since it was introduced (is this a known issue btw?)

Which leads me to the 3.3 beta 2 - I tried it out last night, and while it corrected the blurry graphics (the scaling appeared nearest neighour again on XP), the audio suffered the same distortion.

In addition, I had several other XP / Vista / Win 7 users test out the build, and the user with XP SP3 also suffered the issue.

So I'm planning to ship the PC version with 3.1 as it worked well for the first release, and use 3.3 beta 1 for the Mac version.  Unfortunately I've run out of time and need to get it out there!

I'd definitely be interested in getting into the pre-release program.  I'll write you an email and send the builds of the game too.

Cheers,

Jasper

[chris.campbell]

Hi Jasper,

I'll find out the answer for the GPU scaling and get back to you.  I'd like to look into the sound problem asap, as we're trying to wrap up the 3.3 release and I'd like to have a shot at fixing this if we can reproduce it.

Thanks,

Chris

Ps. Congrats on the great reviews Lone Survivor's getting!