Unity Versus Flash - Is Unity Really a Flash Competitor?
I’m sure by now many of you have seen John Grden’s post on Unity and how he thinks that Adobe should buy them. If you haven’t, then I suggest you read it. The post goes into the reasons that John, Andy and the rest of us at Infrared5 think that Unity is a really viable platform, and a major competitor to Flash, in particular for entertainment based sites. Of course being able to deploy to the iPhone is a major feature as well.
What’s interesting is the amount of positive feedback John got in the comments. Lee Brimelow from Adobe had some interesting feedback and some questions as well:
“So I’ve played with the IDE a little and looked at the (amazing) examples. But are you guys seeing this as a potential Flash replacement, or just as an alternative for doing 3D games?
I guess what I mean is can this engine build RIAs and all the other stuff Flash can do? Flash was never intended to be the best place to make 3D games. Of course the work John and the PV3D guys have done have changed that quite a bit. But there has always been better places to make 3D games in the browser, including our very own Director product.
Another point to throw out there is even if we did, or could, get a technology like this, what would we do with it? Roll it all into the Flash Player? Keep it as a separate 3D game plugin?
BTW, I’m asking these questions because I honestly don’t know the answers. I’m looking for feedback on what you guys think.”
Great questions Lee! Here’s my take on this:
This comment in particular struck me as strange: “Flash was never intended to be the best place to make 3D games.” Flash in its early stages was intended as an animation tool for the web, and this evolved into many other things throughout its life due to people in the community taking the technology and pushing it in new directions. I’m very certain that the original creators of Future Splash weren’t thinking of creating a tool for building Rich Internet Applications. 3D is just the latest breakthrough by the community (Papervision3D, Away3D, etc…)
Unity is obviously much better at rendering 3D than Flash at the moment, but it also has other less apparent advantages that could be exploited.
The networking layer is one huge difference. Instead of taking a proprietary approach with streaming media (RTMP and all its variants), Unity uses open standards (Ogg Vorbis), supports full UDP, and it supports true peer to peer with no additional service/server needed like Adobe’s new RTMFP protocol. So in addition to 3D/Games sites, I can really see Unity taking off in the world of streaming media as well. Flash still has some advantages in this area including accessing the webcam and microphone of a client’s computer and being able to stream that, but one would hope that this is a feature that Unity is also looking at adding in the future.
So, now to RIAs. Currently the Flash platform has a clear advantage in this area, but that doesn’t mean that folks in the community aren’t going to start building UI components for Unity. Once this happens, who knows what Unity might look like a few years from now.
Whether Adobe decides to buy Unity or not, they should clearly look at this as competition and learn from it.
As always, I would love to hear feedback from the community on this, as well as from Unity and Adobe respectively.
December 26th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I do see it as a Flash competitor. The reason is that as the “web” moves to different platforms as the main form of browsing one of the main selling points of Flash has been it’s ubiquity. As other means of surfing and more common than the desktop it becomes increasingly likely that someone will come to my site via their iphone or via Opera in their Wii(Flash 7). If I can easily throw together a casual game that has 3D Features that someone can play on the web, their iPhone and on the Wii- while Flash Player is wrestling to get to the iPhone and I’m stuck with Actionscript 2 on the Wii browser the ubiquitous selling line becomes less convincing to me. I can Make a game for all 3 platforms from Unity, I can get an Indie Kit for $200 bucks whereas FlashPro costs me $699 if I’m in the US.
I’ve been flirting with Unity as a dev environment for a few months now. Lately, I’ve been getting more iPhone and Touch project invitations, between that and making games on my site that people can play on their Wii, I’m starting to feel the lure.
I have actually been processing the very same thing for the last couple of weeks and plan to put together a much more legible post this weekend. I appreciate your entry because it validates a background thought that I’ve been nursing and stimulates a lot of ideas.
December 26th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
I’ve looked at examples and it is clear that unity3d has all (or almost all) pv3d and other flash 3d enthusiasts ever wanted to have, but are simply too limited with player. So, Adobe, go for it!
Full UDP, etc, I don’t know how this could be compatible with Adobe strategy…
On the other hand, Adobe has it’s own game product, and current flash/flex/air RIA strategy try to be “all but no game engine”
my 0.2 $
December 26th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Great Post!! Been thinking the same things lately. My question is - What causes the flash player to bottle neck when it comes to rendering 3D elements. Unity apparently does a great job of this! With my current projects, I feel like we’re stretching the limits of the flash 3d engines, and it’s really not cutting it for us anymore.
I’ll say this - If Unity had the same player penetration as the flash player, I’d start making the switch.
December 27th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Check this out - it’s Unity’s Christmas card for this year. If this doesn’t show people where flash *should* or *could* be, I don’t think they’re paying attention
http://unity3d.com/happyholidays/
lighting, terrain, particles, sound, interactivity, 2D elements. Awesome.
December 27th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Thanks for the feedback people! Really great comments!
On a new note, I was talking with Andy Zupko yesterday right after I wrote this post, and he pointed out that there’s this DLL for Unity called HTMLTexture, which allows a developer to add Quicktime of Flash content directly in a Unity app. So, it looks like with some smart ingenuity we can use the best of both worlds for now by creating communication over the external interface. There’s also a new open source project out there too that simplifies the communication between Flash and Unity: http://code.google.com/p/aquiris-u3dobject/. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but it does sound promising.
Keep the comments coming!
December 27th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[...] 27, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized | After reading John Grden’s post about Unity 3D and this post on the subject, I thought i’d add my opinion. Let me say that i am a longtime flash developper coming from [...]
December 28th, 2008 at 5:01 am
(caveat emptor: I am working on Unity)
@Joel Caballero: what makes Flash limited in 3D (right now) is that almost any real 3D in there is software rendered in ActionScript. Just like in the old days of software rendering - there is a bunch of code that knows about polygons, knows where camera/lights are located, transforms the polygons, rasterizes them pixel by pixel etc. The graphics card does pretty much nothing. I’m not talking about the ability to do blits and to rotate planes in Flash 10 of course. But with Flash right now there’s just no way you could render a million polygon scene with textures and lighting in realtime (with Unity you can do this, provided the user has decent graphics card).
Unity, on the other hand, talks directly to Direct3D, OpenGL and whatever is on other platforms (OpenGL ES on iPhone, priopretary APIs on the Wii).
I don’t think adding “real 3D” to Flash is an easy process. It it was easy, I guess Adobe would have merged Shockwave years ago. It’s like adding a whole different world. Your game/app suddenly not only runs on the CPU, it also uses the GPU and those are quite different beasts. Your content is suddenly concerned about 3D positions and orientations (quaternions, anyone?), about lights and cameras, and polygons and level of detail schemes and shaders etc. Your code is full of dot products and other strange beasts.
On the implementation side (i.e. the plugin), it’s also a whole different world, particularly in compatibility and stability. Graphics cards and drivers are getting quite good and stable by now, but there is tons of people out there with old graphics cards and crappy (or nonexisting!) drivers, and that is just a bluescreen land, unless the plugin actively tries to work around driver bugs, especially when you try to use some of advanced stuff like render-to-texture and shaders (Shockwave does not have this problem so bad because it just can’t use any of that tech…).
December 28th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
[...] Unity Versus Flash - Is Unity Really a Flash Competitor?- This post was the starter’s pistol as far as I’m concerned. Multiple people are wondering the same thing [...]
December 29th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
@Aras
Thanks! That really clears it up.
What’s harder to build, Flash ( with all of it’s components ) or Unity ( with all of it’s 3D capabilities )? Looks like they’re completly different tools right now.
Guess we just have to wait and see if Unity start’s building some components or if Flash starts merging the shockwave player.
I’ll say this - I’m not learning Lingo!!
January 1st, 2009 at 11:00 am
@Joel: I work on Unity, and haven’t worked on Flash, so I don’t know which one is harder to build
January 9th, 2009 at 9:16 am
[...] > Unity Versus Flash - Is Unity Really a Flash Competitor? | Chris Allen [...]
February 11th, 2009 at 6:07 am
Unity3d is amazing if not a little unstable, the process of building a game isn’t so dissimilar from building content in flash and the code is fairly similar, although you can program in C# mono in unity as well as js. As far as adobe buying unity I think adobe has bought enough of its rivals. I don’t really see the products being comparable or competitors as unity cant do ui stuff thats is as designer friendly and flash’s 3d stuff (awesome achievements aside) is laughable in comparison
February 20th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Sorry guys, I have to agree with the Adobe employee on this one.
True 3D 0 is no more a priority in Flash than is displaying e-documents, laying out Persian text, playing HD video, etc etc… so it there’s some sense in the fact that it has been waiting in line. ( Not to mention Adobe being afraid of noobs creating GPU dependent advertising ads etc )
How is the fact that mac player size is 5.5 Mb relevant at all?
Seriously, when was the last time you guys looked at the market share for mac computers in developing countries? I live in one and I can tell you: 99% of the people I know have not even **seen** a mac computer in their lives. Why? Simple because out side of a development house, there’s none to be seen.
If you guys back up from your daily routines and wear the average Joe’s shoes for just a second - and by the way, billions of us could not care less about 3D content - you might better be able to understand Adobe’s business strategy.
Having said that… you keep push that lazy elephant, ok?
February 20th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Sorry guys, I have to agree with the Adobe employee on this one.
True 3D is no more a priority in Flash than is displaying e-documents, laying out Persian text, playing HD video, etc etc… so it there’s some sense in the fact that it has been waiting in line. ( Not to mention Adobe being afraid of noobs creating GPU dependent advertising ads etc )
How is the fact that mac player size is 5.5 Mb relevant at all?
Seriously, when was the last time you guys looked at the market share for mac computers in developing countries? I live in one and I can tell you: 99% of the people I know have not even **seen** a mac in their lives. Why? Simple because, outside of development houses, there’s none to be seen.
If you guys back up from your daily routines and wear the average Joe’s shoes for just a second - and by the way, billions of us could not care less about 3D content - you might better be able to understand Adobe’s strategy for the Flash Player.
Having said that… you keep pushing that lazy elephant!!
February 25th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
[...] the intial discussion came up in the Blogosphere about Unity3D being competition for Flash my first and final answer was yes. Instead of thinking [...]
February 26th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Both great tools but at the moment seem very different. I couldn’t see my flash action scriptors or designers being quickly reskilled to handle Unity or any of the other 3D engines
March 4th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Flash and Unity can work together to build great applications. I created Flashcot to integrate them, if you are interested please check out this information: http://gamelix.com/?page_id=31
May 27th, 2009 at 11:37 am
[...] the intial discussion came up in the Blogosphere about Unity3D being competition for Flash my first and final answer was yes. Instead of thinking [...]
June 9th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
[...] Unity Versus Flash – Is Unity Really a Flash Competitor?- This post was the starter’s pistol as far as I’m concerned. Multiple people are wondering the same thing [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:23 pm
[...] Unity to your friends and trying to lead them down the path- that’s just wrong. When the intial discussion came up in the Blogosphere about Unity being competition for Flash my first and final answer was yes. Instead [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
[...] the intial discussion came up in the Blogosphere about Unity being competition for Flash my first and final answer was yes. Instead of thinking of [...]
November 5th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
[...] Unity Versus Flash – Is Unity Really a Flash Competitor?- This post was the starter’s pistol as far as I’m concerned. Multiple people are wondering the same thing [...]
November 17th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
[...] Unity Versus Flash – Is Unity Really a Flash Competitor?- This post was the starter’s pistol as far as I’m concerned. Multiple people are wondering the same thing [...]
December 1st, 2009 at 11:49 am
No idea why my trackbacks are spamming your comments. Sorry about that!