The Autodesk Scaleform SDK is a light-weight, high-performance rich media Adobe® Flash® vector graphics engine, built on a clean-room implementation specifically for console and PC game developers. Scaleform combines the scalability and development ease of proven visual authoring tools, such as the Adobe Creative Suite®, with the latest hardware graphics acceleration that cutting-edge game developers demand.
Since Flash is primarily designed for the web and not game or application development, it has limited functionality in some areas such as focus handling, mouse support, text field support and handling of IME input. Scaleform improves the basic functionality in these areas by adding the “extensions” to ActionScript classes. To enable extension support in Scaleform Player it is necessary to set _global.gfxExtensions variable to true.
_global.gfxExtensions = true;
In most cases, developers will want to add this statement to the first frame in the FLA file that will be using extensions. If this variable is not set, Scaleform Player will ignore all references to extensions, attempting to achieve the maximum level of Flash compatibility.
Developers should understand that extension functionality described in this document will not work in the standard Flash Player, as it is only implemented in Scaleform. Associated with each extension is a Scaleform version number, identifying the release number of the player SDK in which the extension was added. Extensions will not work in the Scaleform Player with earlier version numbers.
Although Scaleform will make the best effort to keep extension APIs supported and consistent throughout different releases, we reserve the right to change, rename or remove extension APIs in the future Scaleform releases. If significant changes are made, we will try to associate them with major point releases and provide notice as early as possible.