Lightspark's Advanced Graphics Engine Progresses

For those interested in the state of the "advanced graphics engine" for Lightspark, the newest and promising open-source project to implement support for Adobe's Flash/SWF specification, there's an update. This graphics engine is progressing, according to Alessandro Pignotti, the lead developer of Lightspark.

In a new blog post by Alessandro he announces another Lightspark Flash Player point release that offers up bug-fixes and he proceeds to talk about the progress being made on this graphics engine.

For those that didn't read our original write-up about the graphics improvements coming to Lightspark, "The new graphics path for Lightspark is expected to be faster and more powerful with a mix of hardware and software rendering with its design being inspired by modern compositing managers. Geometries will be generated using Cairo in a multi-threaded friendly manner. The resulting objects will then be offloaded to the GPU using PBOs (Pixel Buffer Objects) while OpenGL will be used to blit the rendered components on the screen and apply any filters/effects."

The new graphics engine for Flash isn't yet up to a feature parity with the current engine found in Lightspark 0.4.x, but it's looking good and still sounds to be on track for Lightspark 0.4.5. Alessandro is also reporting speed gains for this new code path that leverages Cairo and more advanced drawing techniques than the current implementation.