Flash Player Games – Is It All About the Polygons?
Posted by brooks in Flash on Feb 26th, 2009 | 6 commentsRaph Koster sees the Flash Platform as the potential future of gaming:
John Grden and some of the other 3d elites in the Flash world don’t feel Flash 3d is good enough.
Is either party correct? Is the answer, almost? Or, does it lie to some other web rendering engine to wrest yet another Silmaril from the clutches of old media? It’s enough to make me wonder if the Mozilla cats won’t get jealous and make 3d gaming a part of the html 5.1 spec( three cheers for FOSS and yet another browser land grab in the Flash world). ;-)
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6 Responses to “ “Flash Player Games – Is It All About the Polygons?”
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Well, I didn’t say it wasn’t “good enough” in general, but for some purposes, it definitely can’t compare. That’s for sure ;) I just wanted to be clear on that. I love PV3D and what it gives me in Flash – which is something I’ve been dying for for over 8yrs now. From that POV, it rocks. But when you get into situations where client A has a great idea but it’s just not possible with flash, you *have* to get another tool. Up until about 3 months ago, there wasn’t any other tool I felt I would use. Unity3D changed all that and more:)
LOVE YOU!
This was my favorite line in the Koster BBC interview:
“There are a few 3D engines out there – Papervision, Alternativa and Away3D – and they are developing rapidly. They are surprisingly good and are all built on top of Flash.”
For the title “Is It All About the Polygons?”, sampling a surface will always be important, and rendering efficiency will always continue to increase. But I’ve a gut feeling that it won’t be just 3D-modeling techniques we’ll be using to synthesize imagery in the future — there’s a lot of innovation in using image sets and video now. We all need polys, but polys is not all there is.
jd/adobe
@John Grden- Man, didn’t mean to incorrectly characterize your position, just knew you were pushing Adobe for the type of performance seen in Unity3d. Rock On!
@JD – The intriguing part is whether Flash Player already has enough 3d in the same way that the Wii has just enough horse power to rule the console market, but yah I can’t wait to see the innovation that happens over the next 5 years.
Having developed a few PaperVision games (e.g. Meta4orce), as well as other Flash and Shockwave games and also played with Silverlight, XNA and JavaFX, I feel I can wade in here.
What I think we forget is that Flash has the most powerful *2D* engine by a long way. Not necessarily the fastest rendering, but the best scene-graph, animation and nesting support, making game development quicker and easier. 2D games are still very popular, and gameplay is king. 3D doesn’t replace 2D, it’s just another option. Should Nitrome be making 3D games when they already make awesome games in 2D? NO!
Flash 3D is weak compared to Unity3D, so let’s use each one to its best advantage.
Long live 2D!
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