Posts Tagged ‘unity3d’
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Flash Player 11 / Molehill Monster Link Round-up
27th Feb 20118
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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@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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Akihabara – 8-bit style game library for HTML5
30th Apr 2010Given all the current Flash vs. HTML5 furore going on at the moment, I thought I’d throw this into the pit and let it smoke:
Akihabara is a set of game libraries that let you create 8-bit/16-bit style games using JavaScript, utilising a small sub-set of HTML5 that is available in most modern browsers. Yes, HTML5, not Flash. The site claims they’ll work across Chrome, Safari, FireFox and Opera. Apparently a benefit of the engine is that they’ll also work on the iPhone, although given that they use the keyboard for movements/jump this claim is a little strange. But this is of course game dependant, and you could easily code a “mouse only” game that the iPhone could cope with.
There are some demo games on the site, which are also the example games in the download. None of them are going to set the world on fire and all are easily re-created in Flash at much higher frame rates. But I have full respect for the developer who created this project, and I’d love to see where it progresses.
The only reason I won’t invest any time in digging deeper is that the example games don’t work on Internet Explorer (and nor does the author claim they will). And like it or not IE is still the major browser of choice. As a result this is confined to “nice curiosity” rather than “contender” for the time being.
http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/
Final thoughts: It’s going to be years before HTML5 is a viable platform for building games, but the day will come. Nothing can prevent it. However I firmly believe that Flash will evolve with this, and there is no reason at all why HTML5/JS can’t become a new publishing target for the Flash IDE.
Of course I firmly hope that Adobe will wake-up and give game developers what they’ve been asking for for years from Flash Player itself. The video battle is over Adobe – you started a whole new wave of technology on the web when you pioneered it. But time has moved on and the browsers have caught up. Leave video behind and start empowering us game developers before you lose us too. We are your final real foothold Flash Player has on the web today. Flash games are still the one area where there are no real contenders, but we regularly have to scale back our games because we know Flash Player can’t cope. We’re hitting the limits of your technology, pushing it as hard as it will go. This is a dangerous place to be.
All of your RIA movements are admirable, but they offer nothing that cannot be achieved via many other different options. Unity know game development, and they know game developers. But their plug-in will never gain critical mass.
Support us or lose us Adobe.
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Play & Vote the entries in the $10,000 Muse Games Unity Challenge
23rd Oct 2009
Back in August we wrote about the $10,000 Unity 3D Indie Developer Challenge that was being run by Muse Games. All they were looking for was “A Working Prototype demoing your game concept”. The prize was a healthy sum of money and a distribution contract. Although obviously they were looking for games made in Unity and not Flash, it was still great to see a company supporting indie game devs, regardless of their choice of language.
Well it’s now time for you to play and vote on the games you think should win! There are 35 entries in all, and as you’d expect the game genre and quality of finish differs wildly. A couple of games caught my eye immediately – the first was Water Mania, which was supposed to be all about racing a speedboat against opponents around islands. Lovely stuff. Except it wasn’t. What it really was was a single boat zooming across a flat water plane with some terrain. Zero collision, zero opponents, zero game really. Still, it had nice music.
A bit upset I moved on to the game Wings of Rage. It looked like a 3D WW2 combat flight sim. I’m a die-hard WW1/WW2 flight sim fanatic, and thankfully this one was at least playable. The flight mechanics didn’t feel like you were flying a plane at all, but the gameplay was fun, and I enjoyed blowing the enemy planes and turrets up. It had a lot of niggling issues, but we can forgive that seeing as they only had to enter a prototype.
Feeling buoyed by this experience I tried another, the lovely named SpringyTurret. This involved dragging and sticking gun turrets onto walls, and chaining them together to blow up everything. Despite a quite difficult control system, once you got into it there was a true gold nugget of a game idea there. With more refinement I could see this one being really fun indeed.
That was just 3 out of the 35, sadly I ran out of time to play any more but they did all look interesting for the most part. RPG games, puzzle games, racing games and several FPS style are all represented. The quality of them is no higher than the sort of games I have judged many times in TGC competitions over the years (the Alienware compo being an especially good one). But it’s still early days for Unity in the browser, and it’s exciting to see where it may be headed.
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$10,000 Unity 3D Indie Developer Contest
25th Aug 2009I’ve never blogged about Unity before, not because I’ve got anything against it, but just because I’ve no real commercial interest until it gains a lot more mainstream use. However I know a lot of you guys wear both your Flash and Unity caps depending on project, and when this press release from MuseGames landed in my inbox I figured it was only fair to give them a shout. The following is cut ‘n pasted verbatim, so don’t forget to do some research yourself to see if it’s worth the effort – but the prize certainly sounds sweet enough.
NEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge
Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.
“As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”
MUSE GAMES LAUNCHES “IMMUNITY,” A $10,000 UNITY3D-BASED INDIE GAME DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGECompetition provides aspiring game developers with unique opportunity to finance their game idea, and lends support to nascent browser-based 3D gaming industry
NEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge
Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.
“As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”
About Muse Games:
Muse Games was founded in 2008 to bring 3D multiplayer casual gaming to the internet’s doorstep. The web platform launched in May ’09 and has been growing its game catalog and adding features since. Recently Muse has opened up to outside developers who wish to increase the exposure and monetization capability of their Unity 3D games.
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