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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'.
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. :-)
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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.
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.
and how is this different to new WebGL which also allows direct control of the GPU with exactly the same security holes...
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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On the technical side, NaCl code is generally more performant then ActionScript, as it does not have to go through high-level language constructs, plus the Stage 3D API does not offer all the functionality of OpenGL ES 2.0 offered in NaCL (more limited shader complexity).
NaCl is also open source, which makes it a standard I'd much rather like to see on the web then Flash (especially with Adobe needing to find ways to actually monetize this, as third-party game engines will not actually generate sales for Adobe's authoring tools).
The thing right now is that neither WebGL nor NaCl can beat the current availability of Flash (98% browser penetration on desktops is hard to beat). I'm hoping to see that change, but Adobe is in a strong position right now.
It won't be supported on Linux :p
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.
NaCL is no good because it is tied to x86. The web is about openness and platform-independence, and NaCl is a step backwards. In this respect it is worse than Java and worse than Flash; it is more like slightly improved ActiveX.
NaCL is no good because it is tied to x86. The web is about openness and platform-independence, and NaCl is a step backwards. In this respect it is worse than Java and worse than Flash; it is more like slightly improved ActiveX.
NaCl is not tied to x86, even in it's current form. Currently, NaCl comes with compilers for x86, AMD64 and ARM. However, this should only be seen as an intermediate step, as the long term plans for NaCl is PNaCl ("Portable NaCl"), which uses LLVM bit code instead of architecture specific machine code. I think this makes much more sense then either WebGL or JavaScript in terms of openness of the web, as it will essentially allow developers to create web apps in any language of their choosing, instead of forcing JavaScript as "the one language of the web" onto everyone.
Does NaCl run on anything besides Chrome or Google infrastructure?
I can only see it being a serious threat to Flash if it runs on atleast IE, Firefox and Safari as well.
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Just wondered?
Ps. I know that's CryENGINE and not UE3.
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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.
Flash now is basically Internet Explorer circa 2000, and we all know how well that turned out (some of us still have the pain of having to support it).
You mean that part when, despite its flaws, it continued to dominate the market for a decade?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
... a blacklist of gpu's?
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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One big disadvantage of NaCl is that it's installed on very few computers, while Flash is already on about 99% of them. And Flash supports a similar "native-code" technology called Alchemy that has a lot of the same performance benefits of NaCl.
It's available already: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/10/adobe-flash-player-11-air-11-available-later-today.html
PNaCl has been brought up in practically every Slashdot discussion even tangentially related to the use of JS in browsers in the last several months.
(That's probably because it's the only option that looks viable for those of us who don't like JS and want a true high-performance language-independent VM so that we can make our own choices. I only hope that Google will submit it to W3C for standardization once they release it.)
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!
It means your drivers are shitty.
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That hasn't been true for forty years.
No, it will be documented, but you must be one of the inner circle to learn the arcane APIs.
Oh, shit, I already said too much! I better hide before they fi-