Flash is still the leader in web interactives and even marketing interactive 3d, Unity largely replaced Director and tools like it and high-end hardware rendered required interactives and games. This interactive by HelloEnjoy has loads of polygons, unity physics system, lighting, environment mapping, showroom cameras, reflection, skid decals, highly detailed mesh and more. Just take a peek inside the vehicle and at the rims for the detail that is impossible with the 2000 poly limit of Flash 3D software rendered engines.
Web interactives this heavy aren’t doable in a non hardware rendered player like Flash. Unity is looking to pretty much own this level of quality in a browser. I don’t think I have seen another interactive looking this good with Unity 3D.
Unity still is lacking many features that Flash has in support of making interactives for the web such as webcam support, mic support, better video support, better gui system, html support (although flash barely) and a larger install base but Unity could easily take the high-end advertising market in addition to owning highly immersive games that need hardware rendering which it is already doing for web gaming. It is 2010 soon, most computers have a decent video card. Put them to use!
Unity 3D Indie is now free for all developers and just called Unity now. The Unity 3D Pro license is still $1500 and worth every penny. But this news is great for indies and moreso the pro users that want the Unity Web Player to have more penetration and installs in the market.
Companies like EA,Cartoon Network and Lego are using Unity 3D and just about every game developer I know including myself has been excited about the possibility of an engine that allows creation of hardware rendered web based games and desktop games, which are multi-platform and paths into the mobile market (iPhone/Touch) and console like Wii and XBOX in development (for additional licenses).
When Unity 3D released support for Windows as a development environment in addition to Mac it literally blew up as predicted this year. Also, Unity 2.6 is out which is big because it finally supports third party source control such as Subversion and Perforce. Many of the barriers that were keeping it from integration into gaming pipelines are gone: the price, the single platform and the source code integration issues. Unity 3D has addressed all those issues.
The pipeline is not yet as streamlined as as Unity 3D as Torque has many legacy formats and components such as DTS models, DIF interiors and DSQ animation files that are specific to the Torque Engine. But they have added support for COLLADA models and the community is strong for Torque 3D. Also, since Torque 3D is built on an older engine but updated for modern uses, the file formats and loading is streamlined for low poly and web based games that need small asset sizes but still have quality.
Like Unity 3D there are many paths to truly get your game published and available to many platforms from desktop on Windows and Mac to web players in all major browsers (and iPhone, Wii and XBox with more $$$). This is an amazing time in game development.
When I initially got into heavier game development in early 2003 after moving from Half-life to Unreal and then the affordable Torque, there were two major things missing, a web player export and a good editor with intellisense. Torque 3D provides the web player export and Torsion is a great IDE for TorqueScript beyond using Visual Studio or XCode for C++ source editing.
Some really nice tools include the River Editor and Road and Path editor that complement the great terrain editor and scene and asset editors that make production fairly quick in the Torque tool chain.
The good news is there is now two quality toolsets in Unity 3D and Torque that for about $1500 you can get a good pipeline and engine that will enable you to create great immersive games for many platforms and the web. If you got the skills the platforms are there to get your game out to the world whichever platform you choose. Similarly to the Flash vs Silverlight vs Canvas progress, with competition in this area it will keep both platforms innovating and supporting developers needs first.
For more immersive games that require hardware rendering beyond Flash capabilities Unity 3D and Torque 3D are now here for your creations.
Electronic Arts is using Unity 3D to develop Tiger Woods Online. The game is currently in beta. It was announced that they were using the engine in June on their blog but only on the reposted version here not the original post where the engine was just deemed “new technology”.
This is a major shift in the game industry and how it is being expanded into online properties that rival or better the console and desktop versions through online communities. Quake Live from id software uses their own system that wraps existing games (originally developed by Gaim Theory then bought by id Software) and instant action technology from garage games that runs instant action. All these systems have provided us browser based triple AAA style gaming fun. It looks like that movement will continue as more and more game companies and publishers see the valid capabilities of Unity 3D to deliver when you need really deeply immersive 3d experiences in the browser. Also other systems like Torque 3D, Quake Live technology and more will be seeing this trend continue when it comes to games online. It is also becoming a choice for online web based 3d MMOs such as Fusion Fall and Marvel Super Hero Squad.
So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different. Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser. WebGL is now an official standard being developed at Khronos Group to bring javascript control of OpenGL to browsers… Wow!
Ok so this was officially announced at the GDC in March but limited information, but now it has been slated for an official public standard in early 2010. Shortly after the announcement at the GDC we saw Google o3D appear doing exactly that, controlling OpenGL through Javascript in the browser but it was still largely software/harward hybrid rendered. Google, Mozilla, Opera are part of the companies supporting WebGL which is great for browser support, also NVIDIA, AMD and Ericsson are in on it.
Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet
JavaScript Binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 for Rich 3D Web Graphics without Browser Plugins; Wide industry Support from Major Browser Vendors including Google, Mozilla and Opera; Specification will be Available Royalty-free to all Developers
4th August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, today announced more details on its new WebGL™ working group for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Web pages without the need for browser plug-ins. First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera. The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards. The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs. WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010. Khronos warmly welcomes any interested company to become a member and participate in the development of the WebGL specification.
Google released O3D this year and there are great strides in 3d within the browser from game engine wrapper technologies such as instant action technology, gaim theory engine (now owned by id Software and runs Quake Live, hardware rendered Unity 3D (and Torque 3D coming soon), and Flash software rendered 3d engines Papervision 3D, Away 3D, Sandy (Sandy also released a haXe version that exports a javascript version) and others. But it looks like the movement is to bring OpenGL to the web as a standard under the name WebGL, this would be great! There would still be lots of times where plugins are better now and in the near future but the path is a good one. Having a software/hardware rendering hybrid like Google O3D for broad video card support (some of the painful older intel cards), or using a plugin like Unity3D, Torque 3D or wrapper technology for bigger engines is a good idea for the time being. But the future is grand in this area.
I think that Google O3D and OpenGL ES success on iPhone games probably combined to get this in motion. OpenGL and very basic video cards are now standard in most machines out there. Unity3D actually published hardware statistics on casual gamers (web-based games) ever so kindly and shows that even though there are some older Intel cards out there, for the most part machines nowadays have a video card capable of supporting at least low-poly 3d and hardware supported 2d rendering in real-time for games, user interfaces and more.
This is exciting news, it appears the movement of the web gaming market is getting much more capable and is accelerating the innovation of hardware accelerating the web.
Haxe Sandy is a version of Sandy that can export to an experimental Javascript 3D engine taking advantage of the <canvas> element. There are some great demos that run smoothly in canvas capable browsers and very smooth in Chrome.
Sandy was actually the first open source 3d engine in flash, maybe this will be a trend building in haXe for export to flash and javascript? It certainly looks like a great start and would make a very nice platform for 3d on the web allowing Sandy or other flash libraries to run in Flash and Javascript by writing in an abstraction platform like haXe. Other libraries like Motor2, Physaxe, haxe3D, PureMVC and more have haXe versions. Still very experimental but a possible need when Flash and canvas are both in the market in the future. Right now it is still all Flash.
Making things easier to produce and control with more simplified and minimal languages like Javascript, Python and Actionscript etc that control more complex systems, that typically you would need to invest more time in such as a platform on C++ is the goal. V8-GL has this goal in mind.
V8-GL from the author states:
V8-GL intends to provide a high-level JavaScript API for creating 2D/3D hardware accelerated desktop graphics.
In other words, you can hack some JavaScript code that opens a desktop window and renders some 3D hardware accelerated graphics. Bindings are made using the V8 JavaScript engine.
Rozengain or Dennis Ippel of AKQA updated probably one of the tools I use the most for flash 3d and that is the blender to as3 exporter. This simplifies loading in the meshes you have and lessens the bulk of the COLLADA format. COLLADA is great but flash is still client side and fairly memory intensive for 3d so loading in models directly to as3 is nice if flash is your presentation tool.
One concern you might have is statically binding the code within a main swf fileon compile and resulting file size compared to loading in the DAE dynamically. But you can just load these in as you would external DAE COLLADA files as compiled swfs and since it is just code it is very compact. This adds some duplication of code (such as tweening libraries or the 3d engine source as needed) but allows a more horizontal loading or lazy loading of meshes when needed.
This is just another option to get 3D models into the flash 3d engine of your choice in addition to COLLADA, some MD2 support and limited ASE support.
This is an awesome project that keeps getting better, thanks Rozengain.
I updated to iPhone SDK 3 beta 4 and iPhone OS 3 beta 4 and the latest Unity iPhone and things were much better in perception of speed at least in early testing. Not sure if it was more from one or the other but the games I am testing/building so far are quicker and the OS feels faster overall.
This build fixes many issues and makes some great optimizations for speed as listed here:
New Features and Improvements
Reduced memory footprint for uncompressed audio by 50%
“Memory usage for textures reduced by 50%. Texture memory is now freed once it has been submitted to OpenGLES on the device. The “Enable Get/SetPixels” flag in the Texture Import Settings lets you disable this feature on a per texture basis in order to access the texture data from a script using GetPixel etc.
Improved iPhone script call optimization
Removed unused parts of Mono runtime
Reduced memory overhead while reading data from disk and slightly improved load times.
Support for several predefined splash-screens (portrait/landscape) for Indie version. Just rename one of the splash-screens in the output directory to Default.png
Exported audio session activation/deactivation functions to AppController.mm
Added Scripting Reference code examples for iPhone specific APIs
Bug Fixes
Fixed audio to play correctly after phone call / text message / alarm interruption occurs
Fixed compressed audio occasionally refusing to play
Fixed AudioSource.PlayOneShot to work correctly with compressed audio
Fixed audio to respect Mute switch and background iPod music
Fixed Pause function and time property for compressed audio clips
Fixed OpenAL memory leak
Fixed PhysX memory leaks
Fixed Audio and Animation assets leaking while loading new scene
Fixed a crash related to playing compressed audio in a sequence
Fixed memory leak while updating Mesh geometry data
Fixed several small memory leaks in rendering module
Fixed asynchronous .NET sockets
Fixed .NET threads
Fixed cross thread boundary calling to the delegates
The site mentions that OpenGL source can be converted to run in the engine. You can do this now with Alchemy although it is in very early stages. It is not clear if it is an automatic conversion or if it simply means it is similar in syntax and method signatures, objects etc.
I definitely will be watching and see how it progresses, there isn’t much other than a single post about the engine so far and no info on the api or sample code. Looking forward to seeing more, the z-sorting is quite nice. Doesn’t appear like collisions are there yet but it has a nice look.
Sometimes excellent toolkits come out of the blue like this such as Ffilmation (isometric flash engine) or Alternativa (flash 3d engine flash 10 focused) so you never know.
So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different. Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser. 
Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet
