blastinburn said:
What I was mostly getting at was that the video demonstration looks fake and would be easy to fake. My disbelief about it being real is mostly due to what I have read in other posts here, mostly:
WarpZone said:
Am I the only one wishing for more dry technical details on how they made this work? Clever hackers have been trying to get 3D to work well in Flash for almost a decade now. It never pans out. Did Flash change? Or are Epic simply that good?
Though I will mention that I'm not technically minded enough to dispute such a claim as flash supporting Unreal 3. I was mostly pointing out what I saw as a flaw in the presentation, it would have been quite different if they had used a flying camera to show off the area without transitions or had been walking around in a first person view.
(Captcha: Grindley prianisf)
Ridley's cousin Grindley owns runs an intergalactic coffee shop that has regular stage shows, the most popular being a priest on a piano.
Indeed, it is a massive step. Basically, yes, Flash changed. Flash Player 11 is the biggest leap forward in flashes technology in..... probably ever :-/ There are lots of articals about it, but it is official and developed by Adobe. Google 'Stage 3D'. In the alpha of Flash Player 11 it was also codenamed 'Molehill'.
What Adobe did was open up low level API's onto the GPU, meaning you can push all your graphical rendering onto your graphics processer (and also things like vertex shaders and all those other graphics things that I don't pretend to understand
). Adobe have NOT made their own 3D engine (Yet, it is in the works, called Proscenium and is available in the Adobe Labs). They decided that if they allowed the low level access, then clever people can build 3D engines on top of it. By the looks of its portability, the Unreal 3 engine is exceptionally well built. Epic can probably just remove a layer of interfaces at the low level end and write some new ones that basically causes all their engines functionality to point at Adobe's low level API's rather than say, Direct 3D or Open GL.
One of the best thing about the technology is that it is still platform agnostic. This means that if you are playing on windows, it will use Direct3D to access the graphics card. If you are on Mac or Linux, it will use Open GL. The developer never needs to care about choosing between Direct3D or Open GL or platforms because the flash player does it for them. I'm sure there will be limitations with this (there will probably be certain very compex things you cannot do that you would be able to if you chose just OpenGL) but it still means you can have beautiful games, in a browser, totally independent of platform.
They also have a 2D framework that allows 2D graphics to be rendered by the GPU. This is big for mobile because at the moment, flash runs like a dog on mobile devices because all the rendering is done on the CPU. People can now build mobile flash apps where all the rendering is done on the mobile GPU, and then all processing is done on the CPU. This will make those applications run MUCH better on mobile devices meaning that flash may now be a viable technology for mobile (which gives HTML5 a competitor on mobile because that is where it is strongest). Does remain to be seen though.
