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Unreal Engine 3 Running In Flash
Eraesr writes with news that Epic Games has added Unreal Engine 3 support for Adobe Flash Player. This comes alongside news that Flash Player 11 has been released, an update that added Stage3D, "a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices."
"With its new hardware-accelerated Stage 3D APIs, Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10. Developers can now animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver console-quality games on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions. 'With UE3 and Flash, games built for high-end consoles can now run on the Web or as Facebook apps, reaching an enormous user base,' said Sweeney. 'This totally changes the playing field for game developers who want to widely deploy and monetize their games.'"
Adobe were losing their grip on the online web-based gaming world along comes this news. I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out. Perhaps a time when games become software-as-a-service and run in the 'cloud'.
no one will document how to do it, so its as worthless as fuck.
I wonder if the hardware requirement will be the same as running UE3 without flash. Given how flash consuming oodles of processing power, I don't it's going to be anything but lightweight, even with hardware acceleration. If flash stopped sucking with GPU acceleration we should see great rejoicing, but I doubt it would be the case. Runtimes such as flash add their own baggage.
Isn't this kinda the same functionality as unity3d already has? (http://unity3d.com/webplayer/)
Apparently the end of flash is night. I can remember adobe putting the 3D stage object (no pun here) into Shockwave right before they decided to abandon it.
Evidently adobe themselves subconsciously know that pushing the Flash plugin is pure wrong. :-)
-- no sig today
In one respect, I can't see this as a streamlined, highly efficient option for developers to write their games against. Some of the screenshots EPIC put of up show a clear lack of shaders, probably because they are either too advanced to keep the game running smoothly in a flash environment, or not supported.
But in another respect, this could mean quite a few future games running the Unreal Engine could very well be run much like any other application in a Linux environment, maybe dropping the requirement for Wine in some places.
Writing a flash based game engine to offer ultimate platform-independence is kind of lazy to me, and I'm not sure how many people will have any kind of good experience playing games using a flash UE3 engine if they run it on laptops, netbooks and phones. But only the future will tell.
Add another 5 joyful years of Flash in our browsers! And now with security holes that can kill our GPU (or our bill by mining BitCoins and the like 24/365).
Good move Adobe, now we won't be able to get rid of you. F**k.
FlashOS
it seems it's almost done anyway..
... you deserve all you get.
Now I can enjoy having my system exploited while watching 3D games.
Despite what all the haters/Steve Jobs-wannabes are saying, Flash is playing a major role in online gaming - social gaming, online casinos, etc. We're talking big business here.
With the support for 3D acceleration and UE3 being available on the platform, I think it's safe to say that Flash will continue to play a major role in online gaming for quite some time.
That said, I definitely see a big potential and momentum in HTML5/WebGL, but it will not replace Flash in quite some time. Even though you can argue that HTML5/WebGL is roughly comparable in features to Flash, there will be a few more years until the toolsets and frameworks on top of it has matured. Here, I would be surprised if Adobe didn't play a role as well - gradually supporting HTML5 more and more in their products.
This immediately reminded me of Google's Native Client and made me wonder why anyone would want to clunker around with Adobe's proprietary technology. Present-day availability aside, could anyone more knowledgable about the technical caveats elaborate on the pros and cons of either option?
That said, I definitely see a big potential and momentum in HTML5/WebGL, but it will not replace Flash in quite some time. Even though you can argue that HTML5/WebGL is roughly comparable in features to Flash, there will be a few more years until the toolsets and frameworks on top of it has matured. Here, I would be surprised if Adobe didn't play a role as well - gradually supporting HTML5 more and more in their products.
WebGL looks promising, but is not nearly as far as flash in terms of performance and compatibility right now. Right now Flash's offering looks very promising indeed, but also gets me worried about keeping a significant part of the web experience under proprietary control. I have more hopes for Google Native Client then for WebGL to become a serious competitor for the time being. NaCl is fast, open source, and ultimately, with the prospect of PNaCl which runs LLVM byte code, more open then any of the other solutions, as it basically allows developers to use any tools they like to create software, as long as there is an LLVM frontend for the language of your choice. Yes, you can also use an LLVM backend to cross compile other languages into JavaScript or Flash, but it seems much more sensible to use the lowest common denominator to build your platform on, instead of cross compiling into high-level-languages.
http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/forest/index.html
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Flash your tits!
All I see is a video. When do we get to try it?
I bet that playing on a laptop, you'll get better battery life playing a native version of an Unreal engine 3 game than when playing the flash version of the same game :)
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I don't even want to speculate.
Just wondered?
Ps. I know that's CryENGINE and not UE3.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Judging by the speed of this, Adobe is back to its policy of crippling Linux versions of their products. It wasn't long ago that they broken video playback, and then years later fixed it, and now they are pulling the same shit with 3D.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
crashplayer doesn't even play more than 2 videos in a row without consuming all ram..
and now i am supposed to play FPS games with it?
that is just comical... porting UE3 to html would have made more sense...
and how is this different to new WebGL which also allows direct control of the GPU with exactly the same security holes
If WebGL or the 3D features of Flash can break process isolation through bugs in 3D graphics drivers, why can't the 2D canvas break process isolation through bugs in 2D graphics drivers?
Cloud gaming already exists. 3D Hardware acceleration is client side, so it's the opposite of cloud gaming.
The reason why this piece of bloatware (Flash) is never enabled in my browser.. Unoptimized garbage..
Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10.
Q: How does one achieve such an increase overnight?
A: Skip input validation.
... a blacklist of gpu's?
I've heard many criticisms of WebGL about it being insecure because it (indirectly) exposes hardware acceleration APIs. I'm wondering if this goes for Flash's accelerated 3D API as well.
Good for Mac and Windows but what about the rest of us?
Not impressed. Won't be impressed until they squeeze the Unreal 4 Engine into an animated .GIF.
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I'm watching the YouTube videos in, well, HTML5 and not Flash!
DSL
Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10
So they have finally caught up with WebGL?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
So first they put Flash UI support into the Unreal Engine two years ago and now they're putting the Unreal Engine into Flash?
Can't wait for a flash game in UE3 in a flash game in UE3 in a flash game in... (yay for infinite recursion...)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
it is to protect you from catastrophic errors with driver access. as in "access web site == system locks"
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Easy. Ads, probably the largest use of Flash other than playing videos. Except instead of boring video ads, they can do it now all in stunning 3D to drain your battery even faster, to cause Windows to pop in and out of Aero when loading web pages and other fun stuff.
And you know somebody out there will make you have to twirl and spin objects around to find that "click to close ad" link and such.
Hell, if it's a site like IGN, you may be forced to "play" through the ad to get to the content as well.
"3d in a web browser" development is a very big opportunity in my opinium. ok, many cpu and gpu cycles wasted, i don't care... the only question is: how long it will take until i can walk in google earth in 3d within a city? give us photosynth for everybody, right now (not on a server), just take a video and make it 3d (still no app for kinect, easy to use and free for 3d reconstruction for everybody). and that is just the beginning... what cool new features will follow?? android 4 with it's ros/java integration (hope they include some pcl features aswell) is a step into the right direction.
Java applets needed better browser integration... Perhaps if SUN didn't mess up on java they'd not have sold out to Oracle?
Flash has become another virtual machine but has surpassed Java in client side features, ease of use, and installed base. While Java continues to be the superior environment... (well, Flash lets you compile things to it without having to write them in Java; perhaps SUN should have gone that route as well?)
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it will crash your PC too!
Huh .. No Linux support ?
Im doing some development with stage 3d.
I can say without a doubt that flash stage3d in firefox runs on todays graphic cards twice as fast as directx games on the highest end cards from 6 years ago.
I can also say performance leaks and is reduced over a session's time. Its still just a release candidate.
I am pushing stage3d in a multi player first-person-view monster-truck smash up derby.
Pro's : Same spectacular visual impact as for example, unity games but at one tenth the size.
The entire set of truck models, textures and physics with networked multiplayer capability is only 600k when compressed to swf format.
Cons: none... I can do fast action multiplayer shared arenas in immersive 3d with pixel perfect depth rendering and hardware lighting effect. in under one mb.
MIllions of triangles..... ha! no.... Maybe eventually, but for now. 12000 actual interacting meshe tranagles in a real game is about the practical limit if you want 60 fps. Im using an upper mid range gtx and sandy bridge2600.
it is to protect you from catastrophic errors with driver access. as in "access web site == system locks"
Yes, and then you upgrade your driver to the newer version and it has a bug, open a website and the system BSODs/KernelPanics on you anyway.
Blacklists have the same problem as virus scanners, you are always playing catch up and there will always be a window of vulnerability when something new comes out until it is added to the list. A whitelist is more reliable but would be a usability nightmare since upgrades would make everything slower by disabling hardware acceleration until a new whitelist is released.
Personally, I'm a fan of properly designed APIs. WebGL sucks, they should have produced a Scene Graph API like the HTML DOM (except not as shit) instead of allowing arbitrary code from anywhere in the world to directly poke at your hardware without asking permission.
I'd think if any website can do that with out so much of a 'are you sure?' prompt then something is terribly wrong....
After releasing Linux versions of all their previous engine versions, and claiming beforehand that they would for Unreal Engine 3 as well, there's still been no movement on UE3 for Linux. For years now. At first it was also out for PS3, and I thought that was insulting enough (also using an OpenGL renderer, etc). Then it came out for iOS, all UNIX-like and such, and I thought it couldn't get more insulting. Then OSX, despite the original OSX version of UE2 being essentially a port from Linux. OSX and Linux are so damn similar from a game engine standpoint, and back in the days of UT2004 the Linux userbase was over double the OSX userbase, so I figured this OSX port was the most insulting this could get. Then the Android port came along, and I was like, "Jesus Carmack they've literally ported it PAST desktop Linux now." THAT, I figured, was finally the absolute most insulting and demeaning way they could treat their former Linux-using fans.
You'll notice a pattern; despite my cynicism (I never quite believed them that they'd release that promised Linux version, and after they stopped affirming the possibility I entirely gave up hope), each time they ported it to a new platform I foolishly assumed that it was the most insulting overlooking of Linux that they could do. Each time afterwards they found another way to push it even further. I have no idea what could be even MORE ridiculous than continuing to ignore Linux while porting it all the way to Adobe goddamn FLASH but at this point I think it's clear that they'll find something. Probably Silverlight.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
deliver console-quality games on Mac OS, Windows
isn't it a retreat?
It means your drivers are shitty.
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