I know they are making Android and iOS free so was wondering if Flash basic would also be free now?
Yes they said they are Sunsetting flash but IMHO the more flash developers you can get over to Unity before you close the doors on it the better.
If you look at all the games made in flash on Kongregate and Newgrounds and you provide them with access to mobile!
I highly doubt that Unity will make Flash free, because then they would have to go on to support it. But they want to escape Flash as fast as possible, and to close that chapter.
flash addon is no more, if you want to get access to it, you can use a unity 3.x release…
but dont expect any new release or fix
What Tiles said. Not only that, but I doubt flash developers would jump in. Unity is not Flash, they would have to learn a product and likely a language from scratch, and they would already had been informed that by version 5 flash would be very likely gone.
True that the flash add-on is no more so we are no distributing anymore licenses for it. But we will not remove it from 4.x versions that still have Flash deployment available.
Flash is dying… 
…is gone…
Would Unity consider going open source with the flash export then?
That would not be feasible without open sourcing all of Unity. It’s not like Flash export is a completely separate code base which could be built without the rest of Unity source code.
I though the Unity engine was a c++ exe/dll that linked to a number of dll wrappers for scripts, you would only need the interface to the Unity engine used by flash open sourced so scripts can still be built and linked to Unity via flash?
Or at the most Unity would provide a flash compatible engine build that the community could then work with?
The the community would just have to ensure the wrappers were kept up to date and that a Unity to flash script converter was created and maintained?
I have a special place in my hear for Flash. I’ve made a good chunk of money off of it over the years. With that said, it has a lot of problems and it really is time for it to go. Stop trying to hold onto it, let it die in peace.
No , flash is dead . I’m not mad at unity for finally saying we aren’t putting up with Adobe’s BS .
The one problem though is for non-gamers it’s REALLY hard to get them to install the Unity plugin .
As in I’ve had people tell me it just doesn’t work , rather then install the plugin .
At the same time, flash was so crappy I’d rather UT stop trying with it , then to charge for a half broken exporter .
Looks like we’re stuck waiting on HTML5 gaming to catch up
Look Flash is on the way out HTML5 and WebGL technologies should be taking over from it in the next few years but in the interim say for 2-5 years it still provides a huge install base of web based users.
It’s not like Newgrounds and Kongregate et al, are going to disappear overnight.
And therefore it is still a good but limited technology platform that can help recruit people onto the Unity platform and allow them to make the transition to the Unity Webplayer and HTML5/WebGL as soon as Unity release a version for it!
Ya, but seriously , its a better use of time / money for UT to work on other stuff aside from Flash .
I was really into the flash preview on 3.5 and almost brought the basic Flash license , but it was a cluster of junk getting it to work .
Like www stuff didn’t work at all , shaders broke at random , ect .
I agree it only really worked if you built it from scratch to flash export testing the features as you go, as too many elements would not convert.
But if you allow for that you should still be able to make a great little flash version of your game that is available to a wider audience that the web player.
In a way Unity have spent a lot of money on creating a workflow to discard it seems a waste.
If they could support it just enough to sustain it until they bring out a WebGL export option which will probably be limited in feature set and performance anyway why not.
Without ever having investigated WebGL or Unity’s WebPlayer I’d be very surprise if WebGL wasn’t one of the fundamental building blocks they build their WebPlayer on, if not already then in the future. Must be that Chrome’s NaCL is WebGL in large part too.
WebGL is a nice technology but even at the pace at its fastest development, it is still 2+ years behind Unitys webplayer and with the inconsistent implementation (Its W3C stuff after all, it will never just work unlike the Unity webplayer) I don’t expect it to ever be en par.
It would have been nice if NaCL picked up across all browsers as it would be the natural fit and solve all problems that exist and will remain in existance with WebGL (multi mb javascripts don’t fly and if you consider .NET and flash as insecure compiles, keep in mind that webgl is javascript which is not protectable at all, also sound support is varying heavily) but it seems that the browser makers outside of google focus on killing commercial games from their browser platforms, especially apple with their anti flash stance.
I guess in case of Firefox, its the common problem that ‘open source advocates’ tend to create, they believe that other people are willing to go that route too, but that will not work out in this case as its not a sustainable business model to gift out your whole game to everyone who wants it.
Good points, although you are not taking into account that the Freemium game model which is taking off on all platforms and genres.
But it’s inevitable as the processing and graphics capabilities of all platforms rise, the common denominator of browser based games will appear.
And yes disparities in performance of platforms are an issue as are feature sets and openness.
Imagine an app store that lets you browse games/apps and try them out without downloading the whole app/game, then when you reach the demo end point you are given the option to continue/buy the game/app.
That’s what people want IMHO, it takes ages to download the latest games but what if the game was playable within the first few seconds (bandwidth depending).
Unity webplayer with Chrome fallback is sufficient for Disney and other sites. Or are you going to present a decent user case that Disney and EA are wrong to use unity webplayer?
What you are doing is championing something people pay no money for that you would get a lot more money from by using unity free + ios / android basic. Just finish one of your games and deploy.
Actually, while I’m not against the abandonment of the Flash player, this isn’t a valid argument. Larger companies are actually safer to use the Unity Webplayer because their customers and visitors are already loyal and trusting enough to download the plugin. A tiny indie developer doesn’t have that advantage.