If you have missed it, Epic and Adobe announced this week that the
Unreal Engine is coming to the Flash Player. On the Adobe MAX conference, they showed that their engine is already running in the just released Flash Player 11, and that you can even play a full game with it.
This video shows a flight through an Unreal Tournament 3 level, running inside a browser.
The demo was quite impressive, but I was a bit disappointed when I found out how they did it: Apparently, they simply (where 'simply' isn't the right word) cross-compiled their C++ code using
Adobe Alchemy. It doesn't seem that they wrote ActionScript code for this, so this isn't really an Actionscript 3D engine. But who cares, you can still write impressive games with it.
Besides Farmville in 3D with super realistic graphics, this basically could be a game changer. First, people and more important, developers see that you can do anything in the Flash Player now. Hell, I've heard that the Unreal Engine runs faster in the Flash Player than it does on the consoles. I guess we will start seeing more and more 3D games on the web now. Besides the Unreal Engine, there are a lot of 3D engines for Flash popping up now. But I guess with Epics nice pricing scheme for their engine, I think all the other engine developers will have a hard time being in competition with Unreal. Maybe this could also be a problem for
Unity, who previously announced they will be targeting Flash soon as well. Let's see. Competition is always a good thing, at least for us, the developers. :)
Currently, with WebGL and Flash Stage 3D becoming more popular, I think the way people buy and use games will change soon. Why should you buy, download and install a game on your system, when it could be possible to play it as well directly on a Website, from anywhere in the world? We'll see how this will turn out soon.
By the way, you did check out
CopperCube already, did you? Shameless plug. It also supports Flash Player 11, already today. :)
"Competition is always a good thing, at least for us, the developers. :)" you mean for game developers, right? but shouldn't this be bad news for your coppercube business?
"Why should you buy, download and install a game on your system, when it could be possible to play it as well directly on a Website," i think if the game gets too big, the benefit of it being a web game kinda disappears and you might as well buy it on steam.