Unreal Engine 3 Running In Flash

Eraesr writes with news that Epic Games has added Unreal Engine 3 support for Adobe Flash Player. This comes alongside news that Flash Player 11 has been released, an update that added Stage3D, "a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices." "With its new hardware-accelerated Stage 3D APIs, Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10. Developers can now animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver console-quality games on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions. 'With UE3 and Flash, games built for high-end consoles can now run on the Web or as Facebook apps, reaching an enormous user base,' said Sweeney. 'This totally changes the playing field for game developers who want to widely deploy and monetize their games.'"

Re:Native Client?

[slart42]

NaCL is no good because it is tied to x86. The web is about openness and platform-independence, and NaCl is a step backwards. In this respect it is worse than Java and worse than Flash; it is more like slightly improved ActiveX.

NaCl is not tied to x86, even in it's current form. Currently, NaCl comes with compilers for x86, AMD64 and ARM. However, this should only be seen as an intermediate step, as the long term plans for NaCl is PNaCl ("Portable NaCl"), which uses LLVM bit code instead of architecture specific machine code. I think this makes much more sense then either WebGL or JavaScript in terms of openness of the web, as it will essentially allow developers to create web apps in any language of their choosing, instead of forcing JavaScript as "the one language of the web" onto everyone.