Posts Tagged ‘unity 3d’
At the Flash Games Summit today there was good news from Unity and Adobe about the Flash 3D API called Molehill. Adobe’s Flash 3D API Molehill public preview was released and Unity announced they will be adding export support for it.
New features available in the current Incubator build include:
- “Molehill” 3D APIs for Flash Player and AIR — A new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs that enable advanced 3D experiences across devices through the Adobe Flash Platform runtimes.
- Cubic Bezier Curves — Using the cubicCurveTo drawing API, developers can easily create cubic Beziers without requiring custom ActionScript code.
This is really a new era of browser based game development support that is going to be very exciting. It was announced at the Flash Games Summit by Thibault Imbert (Adobe Product Manager) and Lee Brimelow (Adobe Platform Evangelist) after they explained and showed examples to the audience of what “Molehill” could do for flash games.
Thibault has a list of available Molehill enabled 3D engines already:
Also a test of hardware accelerated molehill vs software rendered flash:
- Check 2D animation with the display list (check your CPU usage)
- Check 2D animation with Molehill (check your CPU usage)
Flash Molehill is coming and Unity will be targeting it for export. Unity states that they will allow it as an export option just like there are mobile options for iOS and Android.
These are exciting times. Today, at the Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco (of which we’re proud Gold Sponsors), Adobe has announced the public availability of a beta version of the Flash Player, codenamed Molehill, that has a very interesting new feature: hardware accelerated 3D support.
Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.
The article states that Unity will be keeping the Unity Player and the developer will decide when to target Flash or Unity Players or other platforms like desktop, mobile that are currently available and use the rendering platforms that work best with each (DirectX/OpenGL/OpenGL ES/Molehill… maybe WebGL in the future).
There is no announcement of a date but Unity is pretty fast to add updates and new platform versions so if they take this on they will ship. Currently they mention using Unity and coding with AS3 within Unity script or using Mono.NET C#/Javascript/Boo as currently used. An intersting option is using Unity to create content and code in C#/Javascript over AS3.
Unity addresses these issues here:
Q. Is this the end of the Unity’s own Web Player?
Absolutely not. The Flash and Unity Web Players both have their strengths. We’re excited by the opportunity to target the Flash Player and all of its features with Unity, but there will be plenty of experiences that the Unity plugin is better suited for. It will be up to developers in the end, to decide whether they want to target only the Flash Player, only the Unity Web Player, or some combination of the two (now things are getting interesting!)
Q. What programming language will I use?
You’ll have two options:
- For people with a Flash background:
Target our ActionScript API directly from Flash. Think:
var go:GameObject = new GameObject(“Just normal ActionScript 3 code”);- For people with a Unity background:
Script your content in C# / JavaScript / Boo, like you’re used to, and have Unity automatically translate it to ActionScript when you hit publish.
Adobe is good to move to a model where hardware acceleration is part of the platform. Since Molehill is low level and competing products like Unity, WebGL, and others would take that in time, opening it so others can build tools on their platform will attract interesting new developments like this.
Unity 3 has been released. It was released to the world late yesterday. I have been using it for a few beta releases and it is very nice and many great improvements. One awesome improvement is the occlusion culling was ported from iPhone to all Unity builds. Other notable features are a unified editor for all platforms, deferrered rendering and more.
Grab Unity 3 and take a spin.
Occlusion Culling Demo
Unity 3 Feature – Occlusion Culling with Umbra from Unity3D on Vimeo.
Pretty sweet web racing advergame for Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by C4RL05, made with Unity. Carlos Ulloa is of course the same dude that made the Unity HelloRacer. He is also famous for starting Papervision3D for Flash but has been doing some amazing work in Unity for more immersive 3D experiences.
The game is another example of how when you need really immersive experiences for advergames or brands, Unity is looking like a great choice. Unity isn’t perfect for many things that Flash is such as video, 2d games, mixing media, mic/cam apps, and data, but for games where 3d is required it seems to be the way to go.
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.
What are you waiting for? Get your Unity3D on!
Torque 3D is out of beta and officially released to the world. Torque was one of the first indie affordable game engines and they continue that work at Garage Games with a web enabled Torque 3D output much like the Unity 3D player.
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.
Road and Path Editor
Road and Path Editor – Torque 3D from TorquePowered on Vimeo.
River Editor
River Editor – Torque 3D from TorquePowered on Vimeo.
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.
