So i stumbled across some videofootage of the max 2010 Adobe Event - showing previews of what to expect next year. One technology preview is about integrated hardware accelerated 3D.
Looks very promising:
Supports OpenGL on Mac and Direct x on Windows
Support for mobile devices
Seems to have most of the stuf unity does, Physics is there.
how to develop for it is not really clear, but they meantioned alternativa 8, Yoghurt 3D and Away 3D
Now, the New API has absolutly nothing to do with the existing 3D flashplayer API. Its completly new.
a public beta can be expected some time summer 2011.
Unfortunatly i have no link right now, but just google for something like Flash Player news 3D max. Videos are somewhere at Adobe Labs.Adobe.COM
Although Flash run time has been hit and miss (I’ve seen it used successfully in a number of projects, but obviously it has issues all over the place too), Adobe’s IDEs have always been awesome. That said this kind of stuff might compete with Unity in the web player space(where flash is miles ahead in market share anyway) … but I’d say it’s still too far removed from bare metal to be a real competitor on desktop and mobile.
People who know Flash will probably strengthen their love of Flash with this move, but most real game developers will not be swayed by it at all. In fact, those developers that are building platforms around gaming will almost ignore Adobe’s moves until it matures quite a bit for shipping content as most platform builders are targeting Web, Devices, Desktops, Web and trying to get at consoles as much as possible. This is a bit of a stretch for Adobe at this point. No doubt they want to get there, but there are a number of years away from having a real engine. Much of what they have now is stuff compiled into ActionScript.
Okok, Nobody Ilkes Flash any more. Anyways, i Found that Demo very impressive and to Show much more than anybody would have expected in that area. Of course it remains to be seen, what comes out in the end
There is one error in your listing: Supports mobile → nope
iOS not at all and on android you can not reasonable interact with flash content nor does anything but videoplayers and banners work reasonably if at all (HTC Desire on Froyo so the “official OS version which finally got adobes support” or put differently: 2 years of hyping and at the end they did a player thats as crap shit as their osx player where you better have FlashBlock and similar stuff installed if your osx browser shall not crash all 10 mins freezing / killing the whole osx)
I don’t get these claims. Flash never freezes on my macbook. Well, never say never, but in the year+ I’ve owned a macbook, it may have crashed 5 times (and I use it quite extensively since I’m a Flash dev). Never felt like I needed a flash blocker.
Could be that on your machine you have problems, but in my experience Flash is not unstable on OSX at all.
thats called lucky or you just never have 2+ tabs with flash content, though that would be called lucky too
try chrome, upen up a few pages with more or less flash content and then jump into a facebook game using flash … its a matter of minutes till you get the first microstutters and at some point it freezes the whole OS till you get around to kill the browser. Then all runs fine again as if nothing happened.
thought the performance thats massively worse than windows does not get away with more or less freezing:) (facebook games for example fallback to the lowest details normally when checking them on osx)
Also I doubt that a macbook pro with 2x 2.4ghz core 2 duo and 8600M GT qualifies as low end machine, on the windows that thing would easily run the content on a much better quality, as I’ve done thta since VMWare Fuzion 2 / Parallels 3 in a virtual box where it runs worlds faster and no freeze freeze even with 5 facebook games running
I usually have about 20 tabs open (and at least some of them have Flash, including the websites I work on), on a very low-end macbook, but I only use Firefox - maybe it’s worse with other browsers?
Yeah, Flash has always been slower on Mac, but the last few years it seems to have improved - even on my low-end macbook most games play ok.
Don’t know the specs of my mac (I’m on my pc laptop right now), but it was the cheapest one I could buy about a year ago. 13 inch, and it’s not even a pro… The entire thing is becoming a bit slow and in need of a reinstall (or replacement), but still Flash runs ok on it. I might be lucky as you said, but maybe it’s just Flash on Firefox being better than with Chrome/Safari? Or a problem with Flash and certain models of macs, I don’t know.
The Adobe Guy in One of the Videos mentioned that molehill will Be available an mobile devices.
To my Knowledge Apple allows now any 3rd Party tool, i guess that includes Flash too. Anyways, in One Year from now we will Know more;)
As I am sure you all know, Flash is a language based platform, with little or no game engine features as such, everything has to be hand coded. You want a feature you have to programme it yourself! Which is time, which is money, so there is a pay off.
The demo is very nice for Flash, and I’m sure in two or three years it will be very good, but for now… I think Flash developers will be very excited about this. I hope they realise they can’t build levels very easily, terrains, physics, cloth, audio effect, etc. They can’t control character and character animation very easily, they can’t light map, well I guess they can, but imagine the frustration!! It will require a lot more work than if Flash had a fully featured game engine, maybe that is where the market will have a gap for some entrepreneur to make some money?
Certainly one to keep our eyes on just for the interesting web based platform solutions it will be able to offer.
If flash coders ever realized anything like this, half of them wouldn’t be using it anymore or would have forced Adobe to raise the performance years ago when Scaleform started to run in circles around flash thanks to its gpu acceleration
Speaking of iphone development, whats your benifit of cloth and terrain?
As for an editor: Nobody said anything about an editor. With the exeption of Alternativa and the likes. i never tried alternativa, but Papervision and Away3d. Those are just class packages and yes, you have to script everything.
But people made basic editors with those engines! Well admitedly very limited ones. But thats the old Flash Actionscript 3D stuff, i am very interested to see what they come up with.
Apple changed their SDK rules a while back to include 3rd party tools. There’s now a growing number of iPhone apps made with Flash. Still no Flash Player on iOS devices, but plenty of native apps. I see no reason now that Apple has opened up the doors to shut them because Adobe is moving into 3D.
As for schedule, note that CS5 came out May 2010 and they generally run on a 18 to 20 month release cycle. Which means CS6 will come out in fall of 2011. So the beta of Flash Player 11 will likely be out in spring 2011 and released in fall 2011.
