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Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

labs.adobe.com

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Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#4

Post by Groxx »

An excellent example of why competition is good. Unless you think this wasn't motivated by and WebGL getting more attention.

That said: why not just expose an OpenGL(ES) implementation? Then your application logic is portable too, instead of whatever new setup you've got to learn for theirs, and you can fall-forward to a native implementation if you ever want / need to. So again, we have Flash doing something better than a generic language can do (JS)... but at a cost to code portability and skill re-use.

Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#5

Post by tajddin »

Groxx wrote: post #4

An excellent example of why competition is good . Unless you think this wasn't motivated by and WebGL getting more attention. That said: why not just expose an OpenGL(ES) implementation? Then your application logic is portable too, instead of whatever new setup you've got to learn for theirs, and you can fall-forward to a native implementation if you ever want / need to. So again, we have Flash doing something better…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it might be that on Windows, it harnesses DirectX, and since the whole point of Flash/Flex is to be able to run on all of the platforms (fairly seamlessly), this could be difficult if OpenGL isn't present on the system.

Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#6

Post by modeless »

tajddin wrote: post #5
Groxx wrote: post #4

An excellent example of why competition is good . Unless you think this wasn't motivated by and WebGL getting more attention. That said: why not just expose an OpenGL(ES) implementation? Then your application logic is portable too, instead of whatever new setup you've got to learn for theirs, and you can fall-forward to a native implementation if you ever want / need to. So again, we have Flash doing something better…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it might be that on Windows, it harnesses DirectX, and since the whole point of Flash/Flex is to be able to run on all of the platforms (fairly seamlessly), this could be difficult if OpenGL isn't present on the system.

WebGL also "harnesses" DirectX, via ANGLE.

Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#7

Post by caf »

Groxx wrote: post #4

An excellent example of why competition is good . Unless you think this wasn't motivated by and WebGL getting more attention. That said: why not just expose an OpenGL(ES) implementation? Then your application logic is portable too, instead of whatever new setup you've got to learn for theirs, and you can fall-forward to a native implementation if you ever want / need to. So again, we have Flash doing something better…

...and you can fall-forward to a native implementation if you ever want / need to.

Do you suppose that Adobe would see that as a +ve, or a -ve?

Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#8

Post by kj12345 »

Finally Adobe responds to criticism with some actual technology. Next they need to promise improved performance and stability, and an agressive schedule for these features. Having a beta in "the first half of 2011" isn't particularly encouraging on the schedule front though.

Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#9

Post by seanalltogether »

I really hope Adobe is able to pull off a good mass market way of creating 3D content. 3D is one of those areas that's always kinda stagnated in terms of web content, going all the way back to 2002 with wildtangent and director. I really think it comes down to content creation because creating simple content is still a convoluted process. 2D games are so dirt simple to make, but taking the leap to 3D is something most people don't have the head for.

Re: Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash

#10

Post by agraddy »

It seems to me that this is a response to Unity 3D - http://unity3d.com/

I've been doing flash development since 2001 but if I had to build a 3D game today, I would definitely be taking a close look at building it using Unity.

Flash developers used to get a lot of flack for not being "real" developers but one thing I've always enjoyed about the community is that they tend to stay on the cutting edge of multimedia technologies. A great blog about Unity3D comes from a developer who used to be heavily involved in Flash 3d work: http://everydayflash.com/

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