Very, very, very true.
Browsing articles from "October, 2010"
My 3 cents on 3D in Flash
In the light of this years Adobe MAX reveals it’s time to revisit my old post, “My 2 cents on 3D in Flash“.
First and foremost: Finally! It’s been almost a decade since Adobe (or back then, Macromedia) shipped web-based GPU accelerated rendering in it’s other plug-in, Shockwave, with the release of Director 8.5. Ever since it’s been on the wish-list of almost every developer in the community for every single Flash Player version shipped ever since.
As I’ve not seen the API or played with the Molehill pre-alpha (hint, hint) I can’t tell whether I like it or not. Well, that didn’t come out right. I like it already, but I don’t know yet whether I’m going to love it. Looking at the videos published by Adobe and Alternativa it certainly seems that rendering has been enough taken care of with multi-texturing and bump-mapping letting you assume that you could create other pixel-based surface shaders.
What however is not clear is if the API supports realtime-shadows, mesh deforming using bones, rendering to textures for reflection shaders or model-based level of detail. Sure, many of these effects can be seen in the demo-videos, but it’s not clear whether these are natively supported by the API, or whether these have been created using ActionScript. For some games, ActionScript might be sufficient to do e.g. bones-based mesh deforming, but most others, this would be way too slow. Specifically I’m concerned that the Racer demo was said to contain Phsyics that had been created using ActionScript (dudes, you already had Havoc support almost a decade ago in Shockwave, what gives?). From this one might assume that model collisions need to be done in ActionScript which basically will kill the performance for 1st/3rd person shooters or adventure games that have a detailed world where box- or sphere-collision is not sufficient enough. In the end, ActionScript is still very slow.
One other point of interest would be to know whether there’s going to be any specific tooling for 3D. I would certainly hope that Adobe has chosen a binary-based model format instead of going with Collada. This of course would require exporters to all the major 3D modelling applications as was the case with Shockwave 3D. Of course animations would have to be supported, too.
Unity to the rescue
Then it hit me, Unity will provide the tooling. It makes perfect sense.
Unity has long been an integrated IDE for 3D development that has published to multiple platforms. Currently it supports PC, Mac, Web based (through their own plug-in), Wii, xbox360, iPhone and Android publishing, with PS3 support coming soon. It’s in their blood to do publishers for totally different hardware and software environments. And Flash is going to be almost too easy for them. Here’s why:
- You can create applications in Unity using EcmaScript 4 (or what it would have been). They actually call it JavaScript, but it’s a strongly typed language which is almost identical to ActionScript. There are a few additions (such as sub-routines, which are really cool) and differences mainly in how vectors are declared, but these are nominal.
- Unity already has a compiler to create the SWF. You know, the Flex framework along with it’s MXMLC is open source.
- Unity already supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL, shaders and the rendering pipeline is not that different in the Flash Player as in their own plug-in.
- The biggest problem that’s holding Unity back is the adoption of it’s plugin. No-one has it. That makes developers think twice before starting to use it. Targeting Flash would solve that problem once and for all.
There you have it. It’s a win-win-win;) Unity wins by beeing able to sell tooling, Adobe will win by becoming the standard delivery platform for 3D games (it’s not all that certain if tooling lacks), and developers win as they get great tooling and can publish the same 3D app to the web, desktop, phones and consoles.
Update: Fantastic! Four months after writing this post Unity announces support for the Flash Player! A great move from Unity, and excellent news for all Flash devs out there.
10 Comments
Everyone’s Facebook and Twitter accounts hacked and hijacked
To summarize this post: Don’t use Facebook, Twitter or any other on public WLAN access points. Anyone can now *very* easily, in a few seconds, hijack your account.
HTTP is an insecure protocol and anyone on the network can sniff what data gets send from the internet to any other client on the network. Still people have been living under the wrong impression that capturing ones session is something that only hard-core hackers can achieve. Until now.
Eric Butler just released a Firefox extension that makes hijacking HTTP-sessions very, very easy.
Basically the extension looks for data on the network (e.g. your companies, cafes or conferences WLAN) identifying a users session to one of the services supported by the extension, and you can always write a bit of code to support any service that doesn’t use SSL.
I just tried Eric’s extension and yeah, it was easier than I thought would be possible. In under a minute I had captured the sessions to Facebook and Twitter of *all* of my co-workers and could have easily written posts in their name, or worse, reset their passwords and email addresses for these services and thus effectively captured their accounts.
Scary stuff. Currently the only fix is to force SSL (Firefox extension) on services that support it. Read about it on Techcrunch. Otherwise I suggest you don’t log onto that open WLAN, or if you do, make sure that you don’t use any unsecured services.
Stay tuned for more info: twitter.com/artman.
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If you’re looking for an extension for Google Chrome check KB SSL Enforcer.
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Lari, yeah, KB SSL Enforcer works on Facebook if you are already logged in. But Firesheep is still able to capture your session if you login to your account…
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N8 fail
Bashing Nokia has become nothing short of a national sport over here in Finland. Even big magazines publish front-page stories titled “Mokia” (translates to fuck-ups) and analysts are arguing on national television what Nokia did wrong and how their management structure is messed up.
You see, our relationship with Nokia is one of dependency. Nokia’s impact on the Finnish economy is huge. In 2004, Nokia’s share of Finland’s GDP was 3.5%, and accounted for 25% of all exports. If Nokia is messing things up, it’s not only the shareholders feeling it in their stock, also it’s many suppliers and subcontractors are feeling it, and to some effect, the whole Finnish population too.
This is why, with every new model Nokia churns out, the Finnish press goes into overdrive mode to proclaim the end of iPhone’s and Androids superiority and the inevitable Nokia comeback. This happened with once again with the N8. And once again everybody who made even the slightest remarks that the N8 might be competitive look really, really stupid.
Now, the on-his-way-out VP of whatever, Anssi Vanjoki recently famously said that jumping over to Android would be like pissing in your own pants for a short, warm moment in the winter. Well, he surely has got a good point there, one that we’re going to see in a few years from now as Android device manufacturers won’t be able to differentiate their handsets enough from one another.
But still, pissing in your pants with Android is a lot better than shooting yourself in the head with Symbian^3.
It don’t want to go into details on what’s wrong with Symbian^3 as that would be the same as having to say what’s wrong with having a flag-pole up your arse. In the end what matters is that Symbian renders the N8 completely anti-competitive. There simply is no reason whatsoever to prefer a N8 over a modern Android, iOS, Windows7 or BlackBerry OS phone.
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Great stuff, Tuomas. From ver very far away the way it is really strange how Finns behave when it comes to Nokia. There is much fiction, very little facts and yes, I don’t want to have flag-pole anywhere near of my rear parts.
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Nokia almost finsh unless if they invent a new os I know they have Meego but it looks like shit! So ugly. Nokia good only in low end phone so stay with it nokia you want compete with Apple and google/Andriod you have to work so hard cuz those there jobs only in technology field and they knows excttlay what they are doing and they spend money to attract the developer like Apple do 60% for developer and 40% for Apple and 30% from any app bought from app store to Apple. WAKE UP NOKIA WE ARE NOT STILL IN 90s.
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A social media experiement:
Are you, too, frustrated with your Nokia phone?
Follow @AngryN8owner on Twitter, and let’s see what happens.
Follow me on Twitter!
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From what I’ve read, it’s a low-end API with various 3D engines built by various 3rd parties. Also at the Sneek Peeks Adobe announced Pixel Bender 3D will be coming with the Molehill API for 3D shaders. Since it’s a low-end API, perhaps Unity could be integrated to create SWFs. However, Adobe has always made their money off of tools releasing the player for free, so it would make sense that Adobe will introduce some sort of 3D tooling of their own.
Sorry to say that but I think you’re totally misunderstanding here. Molehill is a framework FOR 3D engines, to allow GPU acceleration. That’s all. Unity is never going to be implied in that, and javascript neither. This is AS3, and Flash, finally hardware accelerated. 3D tooling? 3DSMax / Maya will do a lot better job that Unity.
Stephane, I’m aware of what Molehill is and have understood it’s low-level nature. I might have not been clear in my words regarding Unity. They are still going to target the Flash Player. What I’m talking about is that you’ll be able to target a new platform from within Unity: the Flash Player. The output will be a swf, and you’ll program the app in ActionScript.
Moreover, If you think that there’s not going to be a need for middleware between your 3D modeling app and Flash your simply mistaken. Either Adobe creates one (unlikely given the timeframe), someone creates an editor using ActionScript (quite likely most of the engine developers are thinking about this), or you take an existing platform. I’m betting on Unity at least very hard thinking about this. If it’s feasable, they’re going to do it.
HAHAHAHA LOL
you just got PWNED
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-web/
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/
LOL how does this taste, buddy?? XD
Awesome job on predicting this, Tuomas!!
Still can’t customized Right-Click event? (not mean right-click menu)
I reckon you’re right on the tooling stuff as the whole technology will be more mainstream, so there will be a need (which is still a future need though) for simpler and/or more specific / complementary tools. This is clearly a game changing thing (I mean molehill, especially regarding the delays on WebGL), so the whole ecosystem is still to be written of course…
As a technology only, Molehill is not a game changer. A number of solutions have already existed that bring this kind of power to the developer (Unity beeing the first that comes to mind), so to me, the eco-system is already there (although it’s a small eco-system).
What makes this a game-changer, however is the Flash Player’s penetration and adaption rate, which will very quickly propell it to become the number one client side tech for 3D gaming on the web. And again, I think this makes the case for Unity to support the Flash Player even more relevant as there really is no way for them to compete with FP’s penetration. And developers are always very cautious (for a good reason) to adapt client-side technologies that have low penetration.
Well, you can see the future. Few digits from next saturdays lottery? Please.
12, 14, 21, 25, 29, 39, 40.