Posts Tagged ‘molehill’
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Cubes of Babylon – Molehill powered Assembly 2011 demo by Evoflash
7th Aug 20114Evoflash are probably the only group in the world making demoscene productions in Flash. But wow, are they good! I’ve blogged about them several times in the past, and tonight they released their latest demo: Cubes of Babylon at the Assembly 2011 party in Finland. It’s a lovely piece of work – perfectly synced to the music as you’d expect, with nice shaders, smart visuals and quality design to boot.
It’s based on Away3D FP11 with their own modifications, running on evoengine2. In their words:
“It’s basically just cubes and few textures with post processing stack of bloom, godrays, motion blur, depth of field, rgb chroma distrortion, noise vignette and in some parts brightness to palette mapping to create night vision, heat signature etc effects. Runs 60fps on X6 II 1075T & ATI HD6970 with 1280×720 back buffer size (actually because textures need power of two, we got 2048×1024 textures for post processing stack). This was just quick tech demo to see what we could push it initially, I think we got lots to go still. ”
View it here (FP11 + compatible GPU required) or here it is on YouTube if your machine can’t cope.
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Flash Player 11 / Molehill Monster Link Round-up
27th Feb 2011
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 🙂
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9 Videos showcasing Flash 3D GPU
28th Oct 2010As pretty much all Flash devs connected to the Internet now know, Adobe announced proper 3D GPU support for Flash at the Adobe Max 2010 Conference. Codenamed “Molehill” you can read all about it here. I’m not going to wax lyrical about how great this will be, but instead I just wanted to collect together all the great videos showing this new technology off.
Max Racer
The one that started it all, as shown in the Max 2010 opening Keynote.
There are three videos featuring this game: The Multiplayer version, the Single Player version and a video introduction to what Flash 3D is all about (featuring this game) by Thibault Imbert.
Ostrova Online
From Alternativa, the same team who created the Max Racer game above, this is another showcase of their technology.
There are two videos of this game: The original one (referred to as “Islands Online” on Twitter, but non-Russian speakers!) and this slightly newer one, showing the game scene from different angles.
Metro 2033 Online
The final video from Alternativa.
Doesn’t showcase much, other than a murky tunnel system and some nicely animated monsters. It’s apparently a turn-based browser MMO-game in the universe of “Metro 2033” novel by famous Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsk.
Zombie Tycoon Demo
This is a lovely looking game demo of Zombie Tycoon by Frima Studio.
Featuring half a million polygons, 500 zombies and some beautiful shadow and lighting effects, this is certainly exciting stuff! There are two versions of this video: The first is from the blog of Jean-Philippe Auclair who works for Frima Studio. His blog entry is a fascinating read because it gives some juicy technical details. His version of the video has the HiRes Stats component visible in the top left, so you can get a good idea of framerate / ram (in the HD version at least!). The second video is the official one which is similar, but without the interesting stats 🙂
Disconnected Demo
Last but not least is a new demo created by the Away 3D guru Rob Bateman and the Flash demo crew EvoFlash.
Take a trip around a (rather grey looking) city. Flying cars zoom by, water reflects the world, and then a giant purple metaball drops in and explodes the place into bits. Lovely demoscene music to boot.
I can’t wait to see what else is coming! I also can’t wait until this is in public beta. FlashPlayer 11 is going to be a real game changer for game developers at long, long, last.
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@thibault_imbert drops a Flash 3D teaser bomb
7th Jul 2010
A few days ago Twitter exploded when someone noticed in the Adobe Max 2010 schedule a session called “Flash Player 3D Future”. Today Thibault Imbert (Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player) put up this blog post, teasing more on the subject:
“Now you may wonder, what does this means, what kind of 3D are we talking about ?
What kind of API ? True textured z-buffered triangles ? GPU acceleration ? Even better ? What I can say is forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big 🙂
When this will be available ?
We will share plans with you at Max during this session, I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.”
The key part of his post is “GPU acceleration”. The software renderer inside of Flash has long been its bottleneck. It is what stops Flash being a serious contender in the desktop gaming market. It is what makes Unity developers look at AS3 3D libraries and roll their eyes. It is what makes the limit on the amount of pixels we can push around so incredibly tiny, in comparison to what even low-end GPUs can do these days. Equally screen resolutions are constantly increasing, but still we have to cram our games into small areas because performance just isn’t good enough.
Most old-time Flash developers (hey Squize) don’t expect Adobe to announce anything useful. “It’ll be some half arsed gpu acceleration, only available if you set the wmode in the html, or something equally useless”, “does anyone remember the physics demo they showed last year? that never made it either”.
Adobe have a lot to live up to from previous Max hyperbole.
I’m slightly more optimistic, but I can appreciate their scepticism. Having been playing with Chrome’s HTML5/WebGL support a lot these past few weeks, I truly believe this is Adobe’s only shot at succeeding in the 3D web space. Because time is running out for them. GPU acceleration is going to have to work across the board, and accelerate all graphical elements: bitmap, vector, 3D. A cherry on the cake? Allow PixelBender shaders to run on the GPU too.
It’s about time they truly supported Flash game developers. This would be a significant step forward. It would open the desktop games market to us, it would allow proper 3D games to be made in Flash, and it has the opportunity to give an incredible speed boost to all of graphics operations in Flash.
Don’t drop the ball on this one Adobe. I beg of you.
Read the full blog entry here: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1836
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