While most folks were getting ready for the Labor Day holiday, the developers at Unity dropped an extremely impressive announcement: Their 3D graphics technology will soon be able to run in Flash, for Flash developers to use. (Video embedded after the break.) What this means in practice is incredibly graphics rich games and other applications able to run in Flash, a plugin that's already standard to almost all computer users. Up until now, Unity required a separate download and installation, and while it has a large install base (50 million or so I believe), it's nowhere near Flash's dominance, which is over 97%. For 3D virtual world developers using Unity, like ReactionGrid's Jibe, this means a much larger potential audience.
Read more about it here. No word on release date in that announcement, but I'd guess within the next quarter or soon after. Watch the full candy-colored demo below:
Hat tip: Howard Berkey.
Flash may be standard on your computer
Posted by: Casper Jideon | Wednesday, September 07, 2011 at 11:31 AM
I would like to see a frame rate comparison.
Posted by: Frans Charming | Wednesday, September 07, 2011 at 02:05 PM
I don't see any mention of whether this is a Pro-only feature or if it'll be available in the free version.
Unity Pro is prohibitively expensive for garage and hobbyist developers. And I'm not enchanted with a proprietary solution that exports to a proprietary plug-in.
But perhaps the open-source community will take it as a challenge and accelerate their efforts, because the end result is undeniably awesome.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Thursday, September 08, 2011 at 07:48 AM
I think the ability to publish Unity gammes to run in Flash will be a game changer. (No pun intended.)
@Arcadia: Unity Pro costs $1500 USD (a one-time fee), which is somewhere between the cost of Photoshop and Autodesk Maya. The free version of Unity is pretty good, and costs nothing.
In terms of bang for your buck, there's not a better deal to be had. The Unity engine has a feature set approaching the Unreal engine, which costs over a hundred times more.
If you want a free and open-source game engine, you're free to write one :D
Mozilla recently announced a project along those lines, called Paladin:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Paladin
Posted by: Troy McConaghy | Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 08:49 PM
You know, I've never written a game engine. I never thought I had the chops for it. Maybe it's time to find out.
The "soon to be renamed" Paladin looks very interesting.
If the free version of Unity exports to Flash, then I could live with the watermark and truncated feature set, I suppose.
But for the record, Photoshop and Maya are also prohibitively expensive; most independent creators that use them, as far as I can see, use pirated versions. These are price points aimed squarely at corporate users with deep pockets, and represent an especially ugly barrier to entry in the graphics design field.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Monday, September 12, 2011 at 06:39 AM
It was a great information for me. Knowing all of these information is really a great contribution now of what I know. Thanks for the information.
Posted by: Logo Design | Thursday, August 30, 2012 at 05:07 AM