Most of you must have seen examples of Unity3d, like this one for example. On my MBP it runs smoothly in Firefox (people say that it’s total disaster on Safari though).
But this is just one example of what is possible in the browser.
So, why Flash can’t do that? I bet Adobe can release a new player with all cool features we’ve ever wanted right now. But here come business interests. They have CS4 and CS5 to sell. Most likely we will get some of those cool things in CS6 and hardware 3D in like cs42. It’s business, guys. Live with it.
Not sure… are you asking about replicating a particular project in SWF, or something about “running smoothly in my Firefox”, or…?
jd/adobe
I want real gpu accelerated 3d in flash to run smoothly in my firefox.
We all do, but Macromedia and Adobe’s policy always was to have the same experience on every platform and that meant – software rendering.
Considering how wrong they were introducing on2 vp6 codec when h.264 was going mainstream and how fuc#ed they are now with the web going html5 + native video, I’d say that they have to consider more thorough GPU acceleration. Especially that they already support it on mobile platforms and their Director runtime.
When Macromedia decided to abandon Shockwave3D in 2002, I thought they would start working on a game plan for a GPU accelerated, real time 3D engine in Flash. Still waiting.
Oh, so if the question is “When can I offload 3D calcs from CPU to hardware?” then I’m not sure when we’ll see that… the big task right now is to unite fragmented device types. After that I bet there will be a wave of adding device-specific features. But this development cycle’s focused on unification.
(Better to move it out of a browser… we’re constricted in there, compared to standalone playback. I don’t know if Unity found a way to bypass the browser constraints.)
jd/adobe
“I don’t know if Unity found a way to bypass the browser constraints.”
You mean you couldn’t be bothered to type unity3d.org into your browser’s address bar?
Or oh, I don’t know, o3d.blogspot.com?
With Unity you can develop your content once and then deploy to the Web, Windows and OS X standalone executables, Wii, XBox 360, iPhone… why would you use flash?
Heh exactly my dreams for Flash… If Unity larger satisfied audience I would have been working with it already… Sadly it’s penetration is small. Just check games at facebook. I seen only two so far and I guess they are not that bad… Both have user count in thousands range while Flash games have in millions. And for web games this 1000x difference is not acceptable.
Also one of them did not work on Windows 7 and it is actually quite common for unity games to not work on some systems for some reasons. So here it seems Unity team still has some improvements to make.
I actually wonder when WebGL development will start accelerating properly as I see it as a good contender too. Adobe will need to act if JS developers will start making more stunning and well running applications.