Flash3D - Coming Soon - Sigh…

July 9, 2010 on 12:56 pm | In 3D, Rich Internet Applications, flash | No Comments

After reading that Flash will now be moving into the realm of 3D, my response was a heavy sigh, and then a, “Really? Ya Think?”

Considering that this has been the wish of many a Flash developer, plus hardware acceleration, I can’t help but think that this move is a bit late to the party. I love Flash and still use it, but I have been pissed at Adobe for a while with its less than satisfying Flash releases. They could have owned this space a long time ago.  It is one of the many reasons I have embraced Unity3D.

Now I am hearing that this move is the one that will herald the Flash player that will kill Unity. I for one simply can’t see it, at least not yet. First of all, the next version of Unity is coming next month with an array of features that will be hard to match. Forgive me if I am wrong, but isn’t this the first time that Flash 3D is really being taken seriously by Adobe? Unless Adobe has  a super top secret engine in development for the last four years, I can’t see how they will come close to the IDE and performance of Unity. There is a whole lot of catch up to do.

I would love to leverage my AS3 knowledge in a Flash 2D/3D environment, with a player that is hardware accelerated, can do applications as well as games, and work on a multitude of devices, including the iDevices, but now I have Unity. GUI dev is not all that wonderful in Unity, but it certainly is no show stopper. It will not be hard for the Unity to create better GUI creation tools, and thus move into the realm of RIA. It will be a hard and long time for Adobe to produce a 3D engine from scratch and dev environment as slick and powerful as Unity.

We don’t know if Flash will become a 3D interface like Unity, or will it provide the base functions so that you can build your own engine as Ben Garney has suggested in the past, but either way it’s going to be a lot of work.

Adobe: Flash to take 3D graphics plunge

Flash and 3D, here we go again

-DCF

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