Unity astounds Flash devs with triple-A demo

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ThestigGT999

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Video footage shows console-quality game running in browser
Leading engine vendor Unity has released extraordinary footage of a high-end 3D game running in Flash.
The video, found here, shows a demo of Shadowgun – an upcoming iOS and Android project by Madfinger Games – running in a browser. Shadowgun, built in a similar mould as Gears of War, is a third-person action game with graphics akin to many high-end iOS titles such as Epic Games’ Infinity Blade.
Unity said ensuring that a game of this quality could run through Flash was a “major milestone”.
Earlier this year, the company brought an end to its rivalry with Adobe and announced its Unity Engine would soon allow developers to export their games to the Flash player.
Unity claimed that its engine allows projects to build onto a .swf file with a click of a button. The engine takes a project’s existing code and ports it directly into a Flash file.

The extraordinary showcase paves the way for even the most high-end Unity games to be available on the web.
Unity engine for Flash will still support features such as in-game physics, lightmapping, occlusion culling, custom shaders and lighting and particle systems. There will also be some trade-offs too, as explained in detail on Unity’s web page.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/


Unity has not set a deadline date for the rollout of its Flash support.
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http://www.develop-online.net/news/...d&utm_campaign=Feed:+developmag/ifbh+(Develop)

looks really cool
 
Macromedia/Adobe could have done this themselves if they had bothered to continue developing Director instead of pushing Flash into things it wasn't really suited for.

</disgruntled former Director user>
 
Its really impressive. The video showed a bit of fps issues but its not a finished product. Even more reason for me to learn how to use Unity.
 
Given the graphics quality in BSG-O, I am hardly surprised that Unity is breezing past Flash now (in the case of BSG-O it just suffered from having developers that had no clue, but that is not the fault of unity).
 
Graphics look average in my opinion, which is obviously a massive leap for Flash.

However the massive FPS drops (and I get that it's unfinished) would drive me up the wall.



M.
 
That's quite impressive, getting stuff like that working in a browser has always been hobbled by requiring some proprietary plugin which most folk are understandably reluctant to install. The heavy lifting is really being done by the new stuff Adobe are putting in.

I've got Unity on my to evaluate list. The key thing for me is it generates portable code, so it will build for desktops & Android + iPhone. Flash is just icing. I've been using Panda3d quite a bit recently, but was put off a little by the complexity of distributing stuff.

The flat fee of $2000 for Unity Pro is attractive for Indie developers, compared to something like Unreal which is some massive chunk of all revenue (not profit).
 
This is only possible because Adobe are introducing a new API called Stage3D which will be available in Flash Player 11 when its released.

It essentially lets developers create their own true hardware accelerated 3D engines using AS3, which is a big deal in the world of Flash.

Unity however already have their own web player and have been ahead of Flash in the 3D engine department for a while now, but when Flash player 11 gets released Unity could have been in trouble if they hadnt supported outputting to the flash player (Flash has something like 96% browser penetration which Unity could not compete with).

More info on Stage3D here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/features/stage3d.html

It's a good time to be a flash developer
 
Unity is a pretty nifty engine - definitely one of the nicer ones to work with for casual development.

Khrest said:
But flash is buggy and dead and html5 is teh future...

Apparently...
Click to expand...

I love html5/webgl/etc but flash still has far better development tools and more support.
 
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