Flash and 3D, here we go again
A acquaintance of mine had a conversation with an Adobe executive discussing about jumping ship to Unity3D for their upcoming Virtual Worlds. The executive reportedly said that Unity is going to die away in a short while, hinting at 3D functionality (you know, _real_ 3D functionality, meshed, GPU-rendered) in the next version of Flash. There’s also a session at Max this year titled “Flash Player 3D Future” presented by a Flash Player engineer where he’ll demo new API’s in an upcoming Flash Player release.
So, everything points to Flash Player 11 finally having a real 3D rendering engine and joining the fight for online 3D supremacy against WebGL and Unity3D.
While I think that it’s almost one of those CE-Oh no, he didn’t! no he didn’t moments to say that Unity3D is going away because of the Flash Player, it’s a really welcome addition (if done right) to the Flash Player and has been long due.
Unity kicks ass, and especially Unity 3 with it’s deferred rendering, MOD support (wOOt, have been asking that from the Flash Player teams since version 5), audio effects, beast light-mapping, super-fast scripting, umbra occlusion culling, physics and great editor is something that the Flash Player and IDE will never be able to match for serious 3D game development.
On the other hand you obviously have the great penetration (and big community) of the Flash Player which will drive casual game development away from Unity.
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While I can’t wait to see what 3D goodies the next Flash player has in store, to say that Flash would be a Unity killer is no more reasonable than saying that Unity is a Flash killer. Unless the next version of Flash supports all that you listed above PLUS is able (and allowed) to create iPhone and Wii apps/games, these are two very different tools which will continue to coexist for a long time to come.
What this is more likely to kill off, though, are all the independent 3D engines out there such as Papervision3D, Away3D, etc, etc. Now that would be a damn shame as a whole lot of people have put countless hours into creating these things that have been used successfully by the community for quite some time. If Adobe wanted to be nice, when this 3d version of Flash is released, they’d front some of the developers of those engines a bit of cash and a public thank you. Those guys have filled a void in Flash for a considerable amount of time.
Devon, I fully agree with every point you’re saying. And yes, there’s not going to be much left of PV3D (at least the rendering engine) if Flash truly goes 3D. Come to think of it, Ralph Hauwert said goodbye to PV3D development about a year ago. Maybe he had the inside scoop back then?
Adobe is attacking Unity? Shouldn’t they be doing something about Apple? Sounds like your clutching at straws – you’ve put proper 3d off way too long – this should have been worked on when 3D in flash was hot.
Who says Adobe is attacking anybody? This was one employees (oh so stupid) marketing pitch for Flash. I’m sure that Adobe realizes that they really can’t compete with Unity in anything else than casual web-based games.
Flash 3D can be open spec? Then PV3D can be saved since OpenScreenProject is already a success
I really don’t know what you meant by that James, but I’m sure whatever the new features will be, Adobe will replicate those for mobile devices (they would be mad to branch off mobile developent just after they’ve gotten them on the same code-base). I’m quite positive that this will kill off PV3D and all the other AS3 engines, as there’s really nothing that they will do better than a native implementation. Rendering is two or three orders of magnitude slower and any a native implementation will come with it’s own set of API’s (you know, transforming models and their hierarchies, shaders, textures, uv-maps).
[...] Flash and 3D, here we go again [...]
I would say if Flash development environment doesn’t drastically change then people will keep using Unity. For me Flash dvelopment environment just sucks, takes too long to do things in, has the worse debug environment, lots of things.. I doubt Flash has anything to compete with Unity close to releasing or Google would be partnering with Adobe on the Android phone.
Huh, does anyone still use the Flash IDE for development? Try using the Flash IDE just for asset creation only, and do your coding (and building) with Flex, errr… Flash Builder. It’ll give you a very decent debugger and profiler.
I think someone jumped to conclusions here? There’s no engines integrated in the Flash Player and there never will be. It’s just a runtime that offers low level features that you can BUILD engines upon. Away3D and the other existing engines will rather thrive – that is IF they implement the new 3D features.
Also – I wouldn’t bet on PV3D atm. Just take a look at the date for the last release / SVN logs
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Jensa, I think your wrong. Currently it’s true, there is no 3D engine in Flash, but with the intorduction of real 3D functionality there’s bound to be an API that’s going to more or less do the same that PV3D or Away3D. Just look at the old 3D API of Shockwave.
Adobe of course could go the other way and just have as have GPU-accelerated texture draw calls, leaving current 3D engines thrive. This however would cripple the whole feature in the first place. Having to z-sort trialngles via ActionScript will essentially kill performance.
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