Wooo, thanks to some improvements in the flash player both in performance and GPU support it is looking more like a really strong contender for game dev on the web than ever!
What you think? Many folks on here use either Unity3D or Unreal Engine?


Unreal Engine:

unreal tournament

citadel (looks like ut for hand held devices)

Unity Engine:

just a sneak peek
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/

I don't know if I should find that good or bad. It's easier for the causal gamers, yes. But as a game developer myself I'm afraid we will stay for another few years at DirectX9 technology for the PC.

Don't quite know what to say...

Watched a few of the Adobe Max sessions going on at the moment and there is some really interesting stuff going on and some awesome features in the pipeline for flash.

Here's a couple of bits I gleaned:

Flash 11 is faster out of the box (I have conformed this with stuff like JPEG encoding and matrix operations so math wise this seems to be the case).
I saw games demoing, deferred rendering with cascading shadow maps and ambient occlusion still hitting 60fps. Some of these were utilising alchemy (click) to leverage existing c/c++ libraries for physics(bullet) and AI/path-finding and some other cool stuff too. So I expect more hardcore programmers to start playing with flash as a nice way to deploy their content on the web.
Flash 11 should have really good penetration very quickly (they think it should be over 45% within a few months and climb faster than previous releases too),
They will be adding in mouse-lock (for fps games) and concurrency (worker threads that can utilise more cores) and a whole bunch of other goodies too.

Looks really promising and it's moving quickly too! I expect we will see another explosion of gaming on the web, not just little games but bigger, richer and much more involved games.... all that will be reachable to absolutely massive target audience.

I would say that's a good thing

Wooo, thanks to some improvements in the flash player both in performance and GPU support it is looking more like a really strong contender for game dev on the web than ever!

I don't think I get it... it looks like Flash gets a "unreal tech" plugin... or a "unity" plugin.
So, in other terms, as far as I understand, Flash really gets kicked out of the game and real code gets executed.
I suppose there are deployment benefits I'm not aware of but ... what's the deal?

[quote name='bwhiting' timestamp='1317799258' post='4869296']
Wooo, thanks to some improvements in the flash player both in performance and GPU support it is looking more like a really strong contender for game dev on the web than ever!

I don't think I get it... it looks like Flash gets a "unreal tech" plugin... or a "unity" plugin.
So, in other terms, as far as I understand, Flash really gets kicked out of the game and real code gets executed.
I suppose there are deployment benefits I'm not aware of but ... what's the deal?
[/quote]

The deployment benefits are huge, everyone can play flash games without installing them, there are well established advertising and microtransaciton systems available for indie developers, etc.

I'm unclear just how much of what's going on with unreal is flash and how much is unreal as a plugin or through their native code interface. Has anyone seen this stated clearly?

I can only assume they haven't ported their codebase to actionscript...

Interesting regardless, I just don't know what this says about 3d performance from actionscript itself, and I'd love to know.

The deployment benefits are huge, everyone can play flash games without installing them, there are well established advertising and microtransaciton systems available for indie developers, etc.

But Unity does that already as far as I can understand... Sure, getting Unity player bundled out of the box in flash is much better in terms of penetration. It all depends on how integration goes.

As far as I am aware, Unity3D is able to target the flash player as a platform by generating a swf file from your project, converting its code into AVM2 (flashes virtual machine) friendly code. I don't know however if there is any Actionscript 3.0 involved at all.

Unreal used "alchemy", a c/c++ compiler that also targets AVM2, to compile their codebase into code executable on the flash runtime. (may or may not be what unity is doing too)

So flash get no plugins.. it already has GPU access and fast enough code execution for graphics companies to port their code to it to enable to real potentially upwards of a billion people with their game... and audience well over 10 times larger than any game console has.