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Big news if you like programming in as3: Flash is finally going to give Unity a run for the money by including true hardware-based 3d rendering including fragment shaders, openGL, direct3d, software rendering fallbacks, z-buffering, cube textures, and all the good stuff that modern 3d games require. Oh, and it also works on mobile devices!
This could be big! Check it out:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/molehill-3d-apis/
Here is another tech demo video that will knock your socks off. It shows a fantasy world with floating castles in the sky, programmed by a 3rd party middleware company who created the tech shown in the car demo above - prepare to be impressed with what future Flash can do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m053MqzstVg
Will Flash finally knock Unity off the throne? Will near universal plugin support mixed with hardware 3d bring the next level for indie games? Probably. I for one am rather excited. After years of Director 3d (shockwave) experience and some experiments with various web 3d technologies and plugin woes, this is exactly what web gaming needs.
Another thing I like about this announcement is that Thibault Imbert, the product manager for Adobe Flash Player who demos the new functionality, looks a lot like me. Hippie beards FTW! =)
The product is going into beta in 2011 and is called codename "Molehill". I expect we will be making mountains out of it. It is intended to be low level 3d functionality upon which we developers will build the next generation of game engines on top of.
Crossposted from my blog: http://www.mcfunkypants.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/McFunkypants
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This will be an interesting race.