Torque3D seems to have full featured browser surfaces that you can use in the 3d engine seamlessly, see the video below (at :38). This is amazing stuff.

Making games that integrate content from the web is especially required these days.  It is a difficult thing to do within the 3d render because of all the plugins, styling etc that needs to be rendered on a 3d surface.  Well Torque3D has a killer feature in that it supports entirely full features browser render on a 3d surface.  So now you can integrate html content, flash video etc in your game easily.

You can play content in flash player content easily and have stripped down html but it is limited, you can play videos and have content in Unity3d but it is limited, even larger engines like Unreal 3 have difficulty handling flash and html content.  If this is a good implementation Torque3D has a killer feature on their hands! Flash is commonly used as user interface elements and content within games but it can be challenging.  This is pretty exciting if it works as advertised. Think of how cool all the little consoles, mini-games and controls in 3d games could be in flash easily.

See at :38 in the video…

GDC 2009 – Torque 3D Web Demo from GarageGames on Vimeo.

SWFAddress 2.2 has been released.  SWFAddress is pretty much THE solution for deep linking in flash and works greatly in combo with THE embedding solution into (X)HTML/Javascript for flash SWFObject.

The new SWFAddress has just arrived after seven months of active development, various contributions and lots of positive feedback from the community. The list of changes includes the following:

• Refactored JavaScript implementation
• New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
• New CS4 based Splash screen sample
• New Digg API sample
• New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
• New XSS protection that doesn’t affect special characters
• Support for Internet Explorer 8
• Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
• Improved title handling
• Improved unload event handling for IE
• Updated Rails sample
• Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
• Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
• Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
• Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
• Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
• Cross platform build script
• Various optimizations

I believe that this new version is pretty stable and won’t require an update soon. There are two known Safari bugs (19202 and 20355) that currently affect the project and we can only hope that they will make it’s way into the next major release of the browser.

SWFAddress has grown significantly in the last two years and it’s very likely that we’re going to provide a lite version for users who need just the basic functionality. Very soon the same API will become available for Silverlight and we’re also scheduling the development of a jQuery plugin.

• Post about the release
• Download SWFAddress 2.2

I am working with lots of content now that is flash and unity3d in game development for the web, and occasionally systems built in flash, javascript or other have to communicate with Unity3D and vice versa.  You can do this from the server side (WWW/WWWForm class or sockets) OR you can also communicate client side for many things such as sending name value pairs or variables into Unity3D, Flash or the javascript in page as needed. There are some great tools like UnityObject that is like swfobject (only you have to update it to work with latest browsers) that make this more simple to send in params and messages. The same can be applied to Silverlight. It is pretty simple all in all but having a sample to start with is good with all these technologies.

Paul Tondeur threw togetother a little sample that shows how you can integrate Unity3D, Flash and javascript in the page fairly simply with lots of great demos.  It really is just about passing parameters around into the objects from javascript, then within Flash calling ExternalInterface to call external javascript or within Unity3D calling Application.ExternalCall.

//Flash adding callback for javascript code
ExternalInterface.addCallback("functionNameInBrowser", functionNameInFlash );

//Unity3D calling javascript code
Application.ExternalCall("javascriptFunction", "Parameter1");

Nothing too tasking but if you want to see samples of this working together from flash, flex, javascript, unity3d then check it out. Zip on over to Paul’s site to grab the files and more demos and samples. All examples are bundled in one download, which includes all the Unity3D, Flash, Flex, Actionscript and Javascript files.

Here’s some demos

• Build a Unity3D “browserchat”
• Make Unity3D objects clickable and load content in Flash
• Drag a rectangle in Flash and drag an cube in Unity3D
• Add, delete and drag objects from the Flash interface and show this in Unity3D