Flash Player 11 / Molehill Monster Link Round-up

As you can imagine I follow a lot of Flash developers on twitter. When Adobe unleashed the Flash 3D / Molehill release tonight (at the Flash Gaming Summit) it pretty much went into meltdown. Developers thick and fast started releasing demos, blog posts, APIs and videos. Here I’m trying to present a small summary of where to get started if you want to build some GPU accelerated Flash 3D games, or just check the tech out 🙂

Flash Player 11 Incubator Download

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/incubator/
You need this before you can do anything 🙂

Flash Player Incubator at Adobe

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player_Incubator
If you want to develop with it then also grab the documentation, Flex Hero release and the new playerglobal.swc files from here.

Simple 2D Molehill Example

http://lab.polygonal.de/2011/02/27/simple-2d-molehill-example/
Michael  Baczynski runs the polygonal blog, and has published a short article on getting simple 2D working with FlashDevelop and Molehill.

Away3D 4 (“Broomstick release”)

http://www.away3d.com/
Away3D has long been the leader in 3D APIs for Flash, and an alpha release of version 4.0 was just launched. This includes all of the juicy new Molehill enhancements they’ve been working on for the past few months. There are a bunch of lovely looking demos on the site too, including:

Shallow Water
Object Loader Test (lovely textured mapped face)
Environment Map Test (shiny reflective head!)
MD5 Test (walk a beautifully animated monster around a landscape)

.. and of course all the downloads you need to get started coding with Away3D 4.

JiglibFlash 3D Physics Engine

http://www.jiglibflash.com/blog/
Jiglib has provided physics support in most of the popular Flash 3D engines for a while, and they’ve just released a brand new build (with lots of lovely demos) that all support Away3D 4 and Molehill. Some of the demos are stunning!

Unity “publish to SWF” coming!

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-web
In an exciting blog post the Unity team say “In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we’re moving into full production.”  – now that is freaking incredible! You can still code using AS3 and Unity, or move over to C# or any other language they support. This is a major move because there’s simply no better “game building” package out there.

McFunkypants Molehill Terrain Demo

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/molehill-terrain-demo/
Chris K is in the process of writing a book “Adobe Molehill Game Programming Beginner’s Guide” (which sounds freaking awesome). And he has released this lovely terrain demo showing off Molehill 😉

Treasure Dungeon

http://acemobe.com/dungeon/demo.php
Takes a while to load, but when it does you’re treated to a nice looking 3D dungeon (apparently from the game Torchlight)

Minko Quake 3 Level Test

http://aerys.in/minko-quake-3
A complete level from Quake3 using HD textures. Minko is a 3D engine for Flash and this demonstrates it’s ability to load BSP file formats, PVS rendering, light mapping and a nice FPS camera system.

Zombie Tycoon

http://molehill.zombietycoon.com/
This game was demoed at Adobe Max and looked awesome back then. But to see it actually running in your browser is really special! Beautiful graphics and model work, and a fun game to boot. You have to play this 🙂

How Fast is Molehill?

http://iflash3d.com/performance/how-fast-is-molehill/
A nice blog post detailing how 3D used to be done in Flash before Molehill, how it works in FP11 and what sort of speeds to expect. Pretty freaking awesome speeds, that’s what 🙂

Oh and there’s a nice round-up of Molehill demos and articles over on Uza’s blog too 🙂

Posted on February 27th 2011 at 11:30 pm by Rich.
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