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Graphics Games

Unreal Engine 3 Running In Flash 138

Posted by Soulskill from the putting-a-v-8-in-a-yugo dept.
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.'"
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Unreal Engine 3 Running In Flash More

Unreal Engine 3 Running In Flash

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  • Adobe were losing their grip on the online web-based gaming world along comes this news. I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out. Perhaps a time when games become software-as-a-service and run in the 'cloud'.

    • Cloud gaming already exists [onlive.co.uk]. 3D Hardware acceleration is client side, so it's the opposite of cloud gaming.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Does GMail run in the "cloud" or local?

        All GMail rendering happens locally. Why would a "cloud" gaming service be different.

        I love the term cloud. It means fuck all and everything at the same time.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          All GMail rendering happens locally. Why would a "cloud" gaming service be different.

          DRM, silly. You can't pirate a game that's not running on your computer.

          • i beg to differ, u ussally pirate games before they run on ur computer

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by segin ( 883667 )
              You misunderstand; OnLive doesn't run games on your computer. They run the games on their (OnLive's) computers, and they send the VGA signal back to you over the Internet, similarly to an Internet TV stream. It only looks like the game is running on your computer; in reality, it is not. Your keyboard and mouse are then behaving like they have cords several hundred miles long, because your keypress/mouse use is sent to the OnLive computers that are in some office building somewhere. It's like GoToMyPC, or Te

    • Adobe were losing their grip on the online web-based gaming world along comes this news. I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out.

      Easy. Ads, probably the largest use of Flash other than playing videos. Except instead of boring video ads, they can do it now all in stunning 3D to drain your battery even faster, to cause Windows to pop in and out of Aero when loading web pages and other fun stuff.

      And you know somebody out there will make you have to twirl and spin objects around to find that "click to c

      • IGN will then find a distinct loss of traffic as most people are too lazy to bother. Either that or they'll find people aren't actually looking at their ads due to AdBlock and NoScript. It's Lose/Lose for them.

  • Hardware requirement? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I wonder if the hardware requirement will be the same as running UE3 without flash. Given how flash consuming oodles of processing power, I don't it's going to be anything but lightweight, even with hardware acceleration. If flash stopped sucking with GPU acceleration we should see great rejoicing, but I doubt it would be the case. Runtimes such as flash add their own baggage.

    • Did you read the article?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by karnal ( 22275 )

        This is slashdot. Do you have to ask?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tenco ( 773732 )
        I did and couldn't find any hardware requirements in it. Which isn't surprising at all, since it's basically the slashdot news.

        • "With up to 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2, developers can animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver cinematic, console-quality games both in browsers and in apps." and " And a production release with support for Stage 3D for mobile platforms including Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS is expected in an upcoming release"

          So, consuming "oodles of processing power" should be fixed. If it runs on mobile phones, I'd bet i

          • I think you missed the point in the marketing-speak. They say 1000x _rendering_ performance. We get that they're showing off a solid rendering API. Now, even if we assumed that to be just as fast as a native direct3D game, they don't talk about anything else. You may have noticed the demo video was a fly through, not in game action. What will the performance be of all the UnrealScript code? Presumably that is either being translated into actionscript and compiled that way, or they've written their own Unrea

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by ytpete ( 837953 )

              At MAX yesterday Adobe showed actual gameplay in the Unreal engine: check out this video, at about 15:50 [adobe.com].

              Also, Adobe does have a technology that lets you compile C/C++ into Flash bytecode. It's called Alchemy [adobe.com]. Dunno to what extent that was used for the Unreal demo, though...

            • Well, UnrealScript was pure interpreted bytecode back in Unreal/UT99 days, and it was plenty fast in practice. Given that Flash AS interpreter today is a JIT, and pretty well-optimizing at that from what I've heard, I don't see why it shouldn't be fast enough.

  • unity (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Isn't this kinda the same functionality as unity3d already has? (http://unity3d.com/webplayer/)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Other than Unity3d being neither the Unreal3 engine nor Flash, yes, it's exactly the same.

  • Apparently the end of flash is night. I can remember adobe putting the 3D stage object (no pun here) into Shockwave right before they decided to abandon it.

    Evidently adobe themselves subconsciously know that pushing the Flash plugin is pure wrong. :-)

    • nigh not night.... stupid autocomplete!!!

      • nigh not night.... stupid autocomplete!!!

        Dood.. you are so lucky. I was all cranked up in "spelling and/or usage" troll mode and you recovered.
        You were 1 Newton and 25 ms away from flaming death. ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Nigh. Fucking nigh. Night is when it's dark.

  • In one respect, I can't see this as a streamlined, highly efficient option for developers to write their games against. Some of the screenshots EPIC put of up show a clear lack of shaders, probably because they are either too advanced to keep the game running smoothly in a flash environment, or not supported.

    But in another respect, this could mean quite a few future games running the Unreal Engine could very well be run much like any other application in a Linux environment, maybe dropping the requiremen
    • At work we have been looking to bring 3D to IE7/8 (don't ask... client requires them) so this could be a possible solution to our problem. The only other options we've had so far are software renderers for Flash which are obviously too slow to do any more than 3DS-quality graphics on a very small scale.

  • FlashOS
    it seems it's almost done anyway..

    • Intriguing concept...especially if tied to a Cloud.

      Crap, Amazon to buy Adobe. We already sell all those books on how to use Adobe's complicated tools. Why not sell the software and turn Flash into an OS.

      I think you might be onto something there.

    • FlashOS it seems it's almost done anyway..

      I have a TiVo Premiere... trust me, FlashOS sucks.

  • Now I can enjoy having my system exploited while watching 3D games.

  • I bet that playing on a laptop, you'll get better battery life playing a native version of an Unreal engine 3 game than when playing the flash version of the same game :)

  • Loading times (Score:3)

    by airfoobar ( 1853132 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2011 @06:49AM (#37610556)
    I don't even want to speculate.

  • Just wondered?

    Ps. I know that's CryENGINE and not UE3.

  • Judging by the speed of this [nissan-stagejuk3d.com], Adobe is back to its policy of crippling Linux versions of their products. It wasn't long ago that they broken video playback, and then years later fixed it, and now they are pulling the same shit with 3D.

  • Good for Mac and Windows but what about the rest of us?

    • 2% I guess will have to make do. There is a ton of software the "rest of us" can't run.

      It's akin to asking "what about me" when you pull up to a gas station with a Nissan Leaf and wonder why you can't just fill up your batteries.

      Cause you're in the minority. You get your advantages, and your disadvantages. Such is life.

  • Not impressed. Won't be impressed until they squeeze the Unreal 4 Engine into an animated .GIF.

  • I'm watching the YouTube videos in, well, HTML5 and not Flash!

    DSL

  • Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10

    So they have finally caught up with WebGL?

    • Oh wait, my bad. Unlike WebGL, Flash 11 works on Windows, kind of works on OSX, and the users that could have been their user base are told to go fuck themselves. Nevermind.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ytpete ( 837953 )
      Well, really both have been working to catch up to native APIs that have been available for 5-10 years. I wouldn't really say either one is "ahead" at this point – they've been on roughly the same development timeline, and while WebGL has somewhat better shader support, Flash's Stage 3D has far more widespread availability (which matters a lot if you're Zynga or Disney.com or whoever and actually care to make money off this technology now).

      • Flash's Stage 3D works on Windows with IE and almost works on OSX. WebGL works on any platform that can run Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc... That is not exactly wide spread.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ytpete ( 837953 )
          Huh? No, Stage 3D works on every web browser that Flash runs on – IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc.

          • Right. "That Flash runs on". Flash isn't completely supported on OSX and is consistently 1 to 2 versions behind on Linux, Solaris, and the BSD's. Working on any browser as long as the OS is Windows is not cross platform.

  • So first they put Flash UI support into the Unreal Engine [scaleform.com] two years ago and now they're putting the Unreal Engine into Flash?

    Can't wait for a flash game in UE3 in a flash game in UE3 in a flash game in... (yay for infinite recursion...)

    • Java applets needed better browser integration... Perhaps if SUN didn't mess up on java they'd not have sold out to Oracle?

      Flash has become another virtual machine but has surpassed Java in client side features, ease of use, and installed base. While Java continues to be the superior environment... (well, Flash lets you compile things to it without having to write them in Java; perhaps SUN should have gone that route as well?)

  • "3d in a web browser" development is a very big opportunity in my opinium. ok, many cpu and gpu cycles wasted, i don't care... the only question is: how long it will take until i can walk in google earth in 3d within a city? give us photosynth for everybody, right now (not on a server), just take a video and make it 3d (still no app for kinect, easy to use and free for 3d reconstruction for everybody). and that is just the beginning... what cool new features will follow?? android 4 with it's ros/java integr
  • After releasing Linux versions of all their previous engine versions, and claiming beforehand that they would for Unreal Engine 3 as well, there's still been no movement on UE3 for Linux. For years now. At first it was also out for PS3, and I thought that was insulting enough (also using an OpenGL renderer, etc). Then it came out for iOS, all UNIX-like and such, and I thought it couldn't get more insulting. Then OSX, despite the original OSX version of UE2 being essentially a port from Linux. OSX and Linux

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by pejyel ( 1275304 )
      Exactly.
      1st chance Linux players might try Unreal 3 will probably be through DOSBox when it's ported to DOS :)

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