
Unity and Flash : a sneak peek. - icey
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/09/01/unity-and-flash-a-sneak-peek/
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seanalltogether
I keep expecting to hear any day now that Adobe has purchased Unity. Their
ideas behind content creation and authoring are really in line with each
other, and 3D content creation is sorely lacking in the Adobe lineup.

~~~
azakai
Very good point - that would make perfect sense. It would fill a big hole in
the Flash developer tools, and if Unity were refocused to Flash, it would give
Flash a huge boost: Get all those Unity developers working on Flash,
indirectly at first, but they would eventually write the UI for their games in
Flash and so forth. And it would make them less likely to use other game
platforms.

I would be happier if Unity exported to HTML5, and I assume that would be
unlikely if Adobe bought Unity. But from Adobe's perspective buying Unity
would be the right thing to do.

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watty
I'm definitely impressed, I don't think I've seen a Flash game that looks as
good.

I honestly don't know much about Unity or the technology but my first concern
is performance. Adobe tried the "write once, run everywhere" and while they
were successful, performance suffered. How will something much more complex
and demanding perform?

~~~
matthew-wegner
The performance answer is a tricky one. Unity maintains their own web player
plugin, which runs with native performance: <http://unity3d.com/webplayer/>

My guess is big players--Battlestar Galactica Online, Tiger Woods Online--will
use the Flash player export as a fallback. Depending on its shipping
performance, and how demanding the content is, developers may even fork the
content for each player individually. Regardless of multiple versions of
content, it would probably make sense to push users into downloading the Unity
Web Player for better performance.

Unity is also working on a NaCl port. In a year, 3D web game developers may be
able to offer the Unity/Flash/NaCl versions simultaneously (prioritized by
browser/performance/compatibility).

In general, Unity is well-positioned to exploit other platforms as they
emerge. If they can manage this Flash export, they can probably manage
anything...

[Full disclosure: I'm a long-time Unity user, and I help them organize
proposals/sessions for their Unite conference, but I don't actually work _at_
Unity]

~~~
matthew-wegner
Also, it's worth mentioning Unity has a graphical profiler, which you can
connect to a build running on iOS/web/standalone:
[http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Profiler.htm...](http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Profiler.html)

I'm not sure if that's possible on Flash or not, but if so it'd be easier to
bring your performance up to the platform limitations...

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azakai
What I would like to see is Unity being able to export to HTML5. In principle
this should be possible using Emscripten/Mandreel/etc. Performance should be
comparable to Flash on modern browsers (unless they have some special
optimizations for the Flash VM they are working on with Adobe).

One issue is the lack of multithreading with shared state in JavaScript. I'm
not sure if Flash supports that? In any case I assume something like Unity
should be able to be ported to such a platform (you can still do
multithreading using workers, but you must use message passing).

Anyone know if they are working on that?

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tyleregeto
I'd love to see this, but WebGL is such a mess right now, my PC can hardly
handle even simple stuff in it. It's just not ready yet. The average user
can't get the same performance from HTML/Canvas/WebGL as they can with
Flash/Molehill.

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dave1010uk
Not having used Unity before, I wondered how it compared to WebGL. It seems as
though Unity provides it's own 3D framework to make authoring much simpler:

    
    
        It has built in character controllers, water simulation, particles, a physics engine and more.
        It takes a fraction of the time to make a game in Unity as it would do in Molehill [Flash] or WebGL.
    

From [http://sebleedelisle.com/2011/06/webgl-and-molehill-an-
overv...](http://sebleedelisle.com/2011/06/webgl-and-molehill-an-overview-of-
in-browser-gpu-3d/)

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emiranda
Can anyone get this to work? I tried on multiple computers and I just get a
time out.

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threepointone
Same here. I'm in India and tried it on two ISPs.

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Lucasmeijer
Were back up, sorry about that, looks like all the traffic burned the blog
webserver

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boazsender
Nail in the coffin.

~~~
ido
Whose coffin?

