Unity and Flash... Friends?

Wow, this is quite an interesting development. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, though I suppose it's good for UT. Should give another huge boost in users as Flash folks flood in.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-web/

 

Wow, this wasn't completely unexpected but the speed of this move is mesmerizing . Flash users aside, current unity users will see dozens of web-publishing opportunities suddenly open to them (or at least a few more).

 

It's most definitely a good thing! Please understand that this is not a replacement for the Unity Web Player, it's simply another option to choose from based on a given project's needs. My mind is still reeling from this news and I've known about this for a while now...

 

Forgive my lack of insight into the topic, but what is the Unity player better suited for versus the Flash Player? (and vice versa of course). This is definitely really cool news though!

 

Terrific news !!! Is there any chance that the actionscript native classes will be directly accessible from the Unity environment ? Will we be able to create and manage Flash interfaces directly from Unity3D ?

Anyway, can't wait to put my hands on this ! ^^

 

Sounds like a great addition, that is assuming it will be included with 3.x at no additional charge (at least for Pro users that is). Otherwise, if it's going to add an additional cost, I'm afraid it probably won't be something I'll add.

 

The Flash player is going to be *much* more compatible since the Flash plugin installation rate is enormous and the number of Flash-only portals is pretty large too. The Unity player is (presumably) going to better at staying true to Unity on the desktop. The Unity developers are in complete control of that, so it could always have access to all features. Even if UT are able to implement most or all of the current features in the Flash player, that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll always be able to.

 

mind = blown

 

Performance and features are likely the reasons to go with the true Unity webplayer.

Compatible, widely usable yet not nearly as graphically advanced (deferred, full forward shadow rendering, umbra, movie textures and a whole host of other features likely will have to be sacrificed), yet pretty attractive for social networks and similar oriented "gaming pages" will likely be the reason to go there.

 

Interesting, but it's hard to see how PhysX would be able to work on flash. Still, the more options the better.

 

geeze, you guys are ridiculous! Anyway congratulations, can we expect this in a 3.x version?

 

Does adobe actually full support this? Wouldn't it cannibalise the sale of flash?

 

Does this mean you can now write decent 2D games in Unity using sprites and vector graphics features of Flash?

 

Seems like a very cool move if the performance can be up there. The potential for combining Unity games with Flash GUI's alone (at least on the web through the player using actionscript snippets) is not to be sniffed at. Of course once tasted it'll leave us all wanting more, i.e. flash gui's outside of the flashplayer itself ;D but one step at a time.

 

@Imaginary Human: No. The 2D API of flash is still cpu driven, the hw accelerated 3D is a distinct API etc

 

Holy sh**, I am extremely excited... as usual when its something to do with Unity... Awesome.

Perhaps they have some sort of partnership going or something.

 

when will it be launched ?? any specific date ??

 

Don't think it would cannibalise the sale of flash.
Just take a look around how many people here ask about Flash before they ask about native Unity development. For some People Flash is still the way to go. So why not give them the ability to develop in an editor designed for 3D development and realtime art. At least that's how I understood it.

I'd be interested how the scripting side of things would transfer over to Flash. Not that I'd currently wanted to develop in Flash but it's still interesting since I never really liked AS anyway. AS3 just lost me entirely.

 

ok! i'm excited! yay!!!

 

I hope so! That would be a big step forward

 

Great way to get Flash die-hard developers to spread their wings. There's enough space out there for both Flash Unity content: But only one of those has a development environment that is actually fun to use...

 

From what i have read is it so that this is about a sorta port from unity to the flash player lets say "using the flash plugin as the unity3d webplayer plugin".
Is the other way around also possible? so using flash to produce 2D stuff for unity ? GUI, etc ?

 

There's a lot of other ActionScript IDEs out there, from commercial to open source and Adobe does nothing to discourage them, when there is a lot they could do. Adobe always wants to increase the number of developers for their platform, with the hope that some of them might end up using other Adobe products or switch to the Flash IDE in the future.

Anyways, a number of Adobe employees tweeted the news that Unity3D would support Flash Player and how great news it was.

We've yet to see what kind of 3D tooling Adobe plans to support and whether it's in the Flash IDE or a whole separate 3D tool.

 

Here's my idea - Unity sticks to 3D and scripting, Flash creates the GUI as a plug-in for Unity. I shudder to think how Adobe would introduce 3D tools, remember Adobe Dimensions? A great little vector 3D app Adobe killed by merging it into Illustrator. In fact, what hasn't Adobe tried to throw into Illustrator?

People should stick what they do best, and do that really well! Adobe does design and type really well, and a decent job with GUI in Flash.

Great to see this development though. I would love to deploy to Flash for the web for simple games and animations.

 

Perhaps Unity is thinking that the way to overcome Flash is to assimilate it?

 

That's a F***ing huge news. Sorry for the word, but I couldn't express the violence of this awesomeness any better.

Now, the elegance would be to allow Flash vector graphics to be fully integrated into Unity

 

Should be!

 

Who knows, Unity uses Beast, Unity is at the Autodesk GDC stuff and Autodesk wants scaleform, the only reasonable way to use flash at all in pure 3D environments (as the vector stuff in flash is pure cpu driven and thus totally useless for anything but itself - molehill won't change that)

I would say chances are there due to the relationships. Alternatively though chances are also there that Unity will not see a single update on the beast side ever again, cause Unity isn't asking for 4-5 figure license fees per sold license to hand over to autodesk and autodesk like adobe seeks for cash first and for "do what its meant to do at competitive prices" last, thanks to a similar monopol empowered situation

 

Yup, Adobe has a preview build of Flash Player 11 for Linux on their Labs page.

Only issue, is that everything is currently 32-bit. Hopefully by the time the Flash Player 11 beta is released (this is still pre-beta, as Adobe experiments and works out new features) we will see the 64-bit versions.

 

Could be
That could also be a part of the deal of allowing Unity to export in Flash, as letting Flash vector graphics animation system being used in Unity would somehow mean to buy Flash. Adobe would gain more license purchases, Unity would gain more Flash users, users would gain more ... time

 

Wouldn't make any sense cause we would not want it.
Flashs 2D library is useless for anybody but Flash, because a 3D engine can't afford a cpu driven texture painter hanging around due to the RAM -> VRAM upload you need all the time (texture.Apply). This is not going to change with molehill. Molehill adds a new API for 3D, but the old (current) API will not become hardware accelerated.

The only commercial solution for hardware accelerated vector graphics in realtime is scaleform

 

Unity devs (and others who might know )

Will this exporter also be in the indie version, or just for the paid users?

Either way, best news ever when I read it this morning. I actually asked it way back in November when Molehill was announced. So I'm thrilled. Seriously coolest news evar! I love you guys!

 

oh, I didn't get that Scaleform was GPU driven.. Then, let's hope.

 

Hurrah Unity!

I was just thinking to myself when I saw the molehill stuff, will Flash compete with Unity? But really theres no need is there.. Flash has no intention of integrating multiplayer, physics and whatever else... do they? Although the prospect of Adobe buying Unity is bigger now. UNITY DON'T SELL OUT.

 

Scaleform 4 now supports mobile hardware, wondering if Unity will add scaleform in the near future. That would be awesome!

 

Anyone know if the Flash Exporter will include support for physics? I'm asking because AFAIK unity uses PhysX which means they would need to emulate it in flash.

 

The Flash target is still at quite an early stage of development. We'll give more information as the release approaches (and no firm date for that yet, either).

 

OK understandable, thanks for the reply andeeee

 

This is fantastic news. Was hoping to use Unity for a future project but had identified a number of problems with Web Player. These issues are irrelevant with Flash Player.

 

Physics and other things found in Unity won't be built right into Flash. However, Flash Player 10.1 has peer-to-peer sharing built right into the player. This means while you can share data back and forth between clients without it going to the server, resulting in better real-time results in multiplayer games. You still have to build the system of data sharing yourself, but quite a few of the molehill game examples are multiplayer games. Flash Player 10.1 was released publicly June 2010, so site owners are only now getting comfortable using any features from 10.1. However, I expect multiplayer Flash games to only grow here on out with the P2P functionality.

It will be interesting to see what kind of 3D tooling that Adobe comes up with, especially with all these 3rd parties creating own frameworks on top of the Flash 3D API. However, with this move, it certainly makes more sense than every for Adobe to buy out Unity, to get all the 3D tooling without having to create it from scratch. Not that it would happen, just from a business stand point I could see Adobe wanting to do that.

 

Is it too early to say whether or not it will be in the 3.x area?

 

Yes.

 

Aras, (or someone else as knowledgable), could you comment on the possibility of making an HTML5 exporter? I imagine feature support would be even more limited than Flash export, but I think it'd be cool to be able to export a unity model straight to HTML5.

 

html5 has no support for 3D at all.

I guess you mean WebGL?
Doubt anyone would have the nerve to download 14mb of jscript on each start

 

Yes webgl. I thought that was integrated into HTML5?

I suppose few would have the nerve to download a big file but... how big of a file would it take just to get it to export a model with lighting on it? I imagine everything unnecessary could be stripped out.

 

I still don't get the (economic) meaning of this, but it smells like future

 

Very cool! Was very interested when this was posted. Unity is a fantastic 3D editor that Flash will be lacking even in the next Flash CS6 release.

Although this point confused me:

Does that mean we would be able to code in Actionscript 3 and then publish to say... iOS Pro?

 

There is significantly more to Unity than putting 3D models on the screen.

--Eric