The new Flash 3D looks great! For those who haven’t seen it yet here’s a video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwi0lWgX8w&fmt=22&feature=player_embedded#
Won’t be switching from unity any time soon thanks to its deployment to mobiles 
Neat tech.
It’d be interesting to see the API, as one of the larger reasons I see for using Flash is it’s non-coder friendliness. If it’s like other 3D engines (read: Technical) then it’s just another plugin based in-browser 3D engine (Shiva, Torque, Unity, etc…). Not that competition is a bad thing though.
Will be interesting to see where this goes.
It looks very nice for sure.
With Adobe one has to be cautious though, it has been the case for many years with them that demos look awesome and then in the actual product, especially regarding flash, there are many downsides to it which make some features totally useless.
Like the iPhone app packager they have in the newest flash version, i´m a beta tester for a lot of products and the last flash beta cycle was the only one i ever got thrown out of because the thing is so bad that i found it totally unacceptable to ship it, so i posted a lot of feedback on all the things they should improve before shipping. Well, Apple obviously thought the same, even if they switched the rules again to avoid more trouble =)
Well, at least Adobe seems to have finally listened to me and other longtime flash users, will be interesting to see how nice it turns out and how much fineprint there is this time.Let´s see on ow many cards it runs nicely, how well the software renderer fallback works, how it looks with their ide integration for the functionality, if and how well the 2D and old api driven functionality profits from this performance boost (their beta labs page makes it sound like that will still run in sloppy old performance limits) etc etc.
So yeah, nice, but to be enjoyed with caution until one can try it for a while oneself.
Besides that i feel like now that flash is pushing a lot to catch up, some at least, on 3D side, well, unity now has to push to stay heads and shoulders in front in 3d side and push way harder to catch up a lot in 2D functionality side (the one really big downside with unity right now).
Will be a very interesting race next year and the one after, not just among flash and unity but also the other competing options (though i feel like only flash and unity are in competitive spots).
Flash has lost A LOT of faith among many of the more seasoned designers and developers over the last 2-4 years, they have to deliver and deliver well on all fronts to win many of those back and don´t keep loosing more and more to other things.
All get ready for a wild ride.
the demo is not really stunning at least not with us here at unity sitting on the other side of the fence.
static cubemap reflection, most taxing stuff missing (particle and tire trails), very little alpha effects in general and alike.
also, nothing says if this is a 4.4ghz overclocked i7 or not … on an average computer this thing would very likely stutter like hell and on an osx machine you would take 2 minutes before you reach the point where the start has happened as adobe has not done anything the past 2-3 years to solve the “200-400% slower execution than windows” problem
Personally, I would like to see Adobe die in a large fire for their crimes against applications, particularly the hilariously bad GUI and user interfaces they’ve added to their apps in the last decade. I don’t even know where to begin with ranting about Flash, so I won’t bother. They seem desperate to shove Flash into everything these days, as though they’re proud of it or something.
to dreamora: Well, on one of the videos they show the task manager and it has close to 0% cpu usage while running one of those demos, so yeah, dunno of course which graphics card is in there and what kind of machine setup it is in general, but that point at least is promising.
You´re right of course, having the used to unity glasses on, their demos aren´t impressive at all, its things possible with unity for many years, and as you said, with unity one could do a lot more than shown in those demos.
On the other side, i use flash since V3 and yeah, knowing flash´s usual performance limitations, well, this is a HUGE jump for flash compared to that.
Again, its not yet clear if this performance jump will actually at all be there for all the “old api” made and ide made 2D / 2.5D content, and it seems like that won´t be the case, at least initially, but yeah, being able to use it, even if just by doing all codeside driven stuff based on using the new apis, well, that´s a massive jump for flash.
which graphic card it uses makes no difference, flash only uses 3d for video acceelration. the rest is pure cpu driven.
would be different if it were shockwave, but it does not seem to be.
so we will have to see how much this thing has to do with reality as past 3d renderers in flash reached the border normally more faster than slower.
after all we know that Adobe is the software counterpart to Sony on consoles: Lot of hot air, fake specs and in reality it can at best compete heads on with the competition if it dies not suck and die straight (PSP Go to hell models as an example or PS1 through PS3 on fake specs and hot air, making sony lose over 4B over the past 5 years)
erm, no, you got that one wrong, with the demos they show there now the new thing is that its all gpu driven.
Unlike previous flash players which only used gpu acceleration for very specific (few) things, with this upcoming release, the one these demos where made for, its meant to allow to use way more of the gpu capabilities, hence why the enourmous performance jump compared to previous flash players (with which that racing game demo wouldn´t run that nice in that form even on the most highend machines in consumer market).
Again, its Adobe, we have to take it with a fair bit, not just a grain of salt until one can try both the player and development ide sides oneself for a while, but yeah, it looks like its a good bit more than the usual laughable “improvements” they had in the last few player updates.
Me personally i´m most cautious regarding how well/ if at all Adobe will properly integrate this into the flash ide and whether all things one can make in there get accelerated or only things done in codeside using the new api set.
“all gpu driven” and not just “gpu supported” …
That would be a quantum jump for Adobe, especially given their non-pace on using gpu for trivial stuff like performant GPGPU stuff of even trivial photoshop functions and alike … (the performance gain you get from a strong gpu in photoshop is a joke. Already the first cuda SDK had comparable functions for several of the filters and although that was “long ago” by now, it was already faster than what adobe created between CS3 and now)
I won’t be holding my breath, chances that it looks better than anything they will release till 2015 (3rd refresh from now) is at about 97%
Yeah, some skepticism can avoid a lot of disappointment when its about Adobe, or at least that has been the case over the last few years.
Its also reasonable they finally push it a gear higher though cause, well, more and more seasoned and known developers have not just started looking around for other options than flash and well, browsers and other platforms and middleware for them are all shaping up quickly, too, flash was getting very close to becoming a dinosaur in the days the meteors were approaching: still ruling giant, but having the days of glory and dominance counted, few of em left.
With this and also Apple revising their changed rules again and letting flash in on the app store gamble again Adobe has another last big shot at it for staying relevant in the long term.
Le´s see if they get it together sometime in 2011 or 2012 or it´ll take so long to get t into good shape that people won´t care anymore by then.
Technically speaking, Unity3D is an Engine while Molehill is an Api. So i dont think you should compare the two. If you compare Unity3d to anything than to the Alternativa 3D Engine they used there, and that is in an early state, but it could potentially evolve into something like Unity in the future.
What i would be much more interested in though: Could Unity3D maybe use the Flash 3D Apis as a Deployment Target to get rid of the Unity Browser Plugin ? That could be huge for Unity Web deployment!
no unity couldn’t.
native code is native code, plugin api is plugin api.
its not like this will go through without new plugin installs which as the previous 2-3 flash generations lose more and more install base (the most widely used one is still < 9 while we are at 10.1 already) again for near granted.
aside of that nobody would use unity if they bound themself to one of the largest security threats on the web with the lowest and most non existant interest to fix major bugs.
If flash was taken serious and got the support it needs it would potentially be a thing to consider, but silverlight and GWT did take off cause flash just sux like hell, is buggy, a major security risk and trash performing and adobe although knowing didn’t adress it for the past years.
also unity does not need it, its a matter of time until NaCl will be broadly used in browsers, removing the plugin completely.
and till that point, I don’t see flash 3d offering even something thats able to compete with Unity 1.x
so you think that all Browsers will use NaCl in some time is a thing that might very well happen ? That would be even better indeed
just found this in regards to NaCl stated in june:
booh
they say a lot when days are long.
they also said that they have the best browser years ago, then they brought out 2.5, 3.0 and 3.5
I agree that pushing html5 + JS is important to kick out flash finally.
but beyond that I’m pretty confident that NaCl (or a comparable tech) will at very least become a plugin alternative if not the next level plugin system
agreed, it is important to push html5 + JS stuff, but there are things you just cant do with that yet. NaCl should be the standard for all plugin based techs like Flash/Unity/Java etc, that would be awesome.
Its hard to tell which things will be adopted nicely natively by which browser when.
What is not that hard to tell though is that it will likely take Adobe somewhere around 6-12 months at least to get the player and api side together to the degree where its halfway nicely usable. If they also want to have propper ide integration for this stuff besides just actionscript side support it would take them much longer to get anywhere close to what can be done in the unity ide for 3d things.
In fact all their talk about it right now indicates that they are not intending to allow have all things one can do in the current ide run accelerated like that but rather it will be limited to just things using the new api and hence will at least initially require people doing whole new frameworks and own ide tools on top of those new apis.
Then there´s also the side that it will require the then newest player to run at all, hence that will have a much smaller plugin penetration figure than the unity plugin has right now.
It will for sure grow quickly, but yeah, i´m sure UT won´t sit around in lazy manner for two years either.
Next to that of course flash´s plugin penetration figures are highly skewed to say the least. Example: A quickly growing percentage of people browsing the web are actually using smartphones, tablets and similar “mobile” machine to do so.
Flash plugin is either not available on those at all or in current form runs VERY poorly on them. Hence Adobe figures of plugin penetration figures in the above 90% range are not factually correct at all and the real percentage they achieve regarding percentage of clients it runs in usable form on will actually shrink over the next year.
I think its best UT fellas do their thing and push unity, maybe integrate using flash/scaleform where its useful but for sure not jump on the flash bandwagon the way of deploying to the flash runtime in any way, cause i don´t see any major benefit for that for the unity userbase, just the contrary, it would be helping the biggest competitor heavily.
I am usually all for collaboration, but Adobe doesn´t have that sorta vibe when one looks at how they did things in the past (for example swallowing up Macromedia, stopping further development of many of the mainline apps, slowing down development of many of the other apps, focussing way more on the marketing side and creating smoke and mirror hype pushes rather than giving people what they ask for for over 4 years).
Seems like I’m not the only one who wouldn’t care the slightest bit if Adobe got “payed back” what they did with killing macromedia fine and straight into the face