Lightspark 0.4.5 Is Bringing The New Graphics Engine

Lightspark's advanced graphics engine will soon be released with the forthcoming Lightspark 0.4.5 version. We first talked about this advanced graphics engine in August that uses Cairo and OpenGL for rendering, but finally, after making a lot of progress, it's ready to be released.

Alessandro Pignotti, the lead developer and founder of this free software Adobe Flash/SWF player, has said the advanced graphics engine is now merged into the mainline code-base and will be released as part of the Lightspark 0.4.5 release. This is coming after Alessandro previously talked about making a new Gallium3D state tracker for Lightspark and its needs, but that work has not materialized over this Cairo+OpenGL implementation.

With this new engine, the graphics should look nicer and there should be less CPU load with more of the work being handed off to the GPU. Only holding up the Lightspark 0.4.5 release right now is a bug in libxml++ that is waiting to be addressed upstream.

The status update can be found in this blog post. The PowerPC port of Lightspark is also progressing.