Molehill - Adobe's new HW accelerated 3D APIs for Flash | Hacker News Reader

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

labs.adobe.com

46 pointsbd15 comments

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/

Actually, it looks like more of a new platform similar to OpenGL/DirectX than a 3D engine a la Unreal/Source/IdTech which Unity3D is closer to.

It's not a response to Unity3D, it's a feature that all of us Flash devs have been requesting for years as Shockwave/Director had it, and Flash had taken over its space/niche/functionality.

If you noticed, the demo was built with the Alternativa3D Flash 3D engine. You'd still need to combo with Flash 3D engines like Alternativa3D & Papervision3D to make your life bearable when building complex Flash 3D apps/games.

It would be totally awesome if Unity3D would export to Flash 3D/Molehill in the future! :D

I view Unity3D with it's web viewer as more of a platform than a 3D engine.

Here's a link to an art project built with Unity3D (it may take a while to load - I used Firebug's Net tab to make sure elements were still loading) which I think shows Unity3D is much more than just a 3D game engine and definitely a challenge to flash: http://www.everyday3d.com/works/installation/colors/

I have one client for which I built an interactive 3D visualization system. The project used Papervision and after trying numerous techniques to minimize the load it took on slower computers we ended up having to make it a 2D system because flash couldn't display everything we wanted to show effectively (it's also possible my Papervision skills aren't up to par and a Papervision expert could make the project work, I still have a feeling the visualization would still need to be limited). Molehill would probably really help this project out.

After building the above system, I started seeing more and more information about Unity3D. If I was to start the project again today, I'm pretty sure I would look heavily into using Unity3D over Flash for the visualization system.

The blog I mentioned in my first post has an excellent post about Unity3D's potential future: http://www.everyday3d.com/blog/index.php/2010/03/08/unity3d-...

As the official video is currently down, here are some examples from AlternativaPlatform which are using these new APIs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m053MqzstVg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwi0lWgX8w

An excellent example of why competition is good. Unless you think this wasn't motivated by <canvas> 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.

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.

The only difficulty would be with the earlier Intel graphics chips (GMA9xx and GMA3xx0, the latter used more recently on some Atom machines). Some of these models support OpenGL 2.0 but their Windows drivers don't. Nobody's going to care about pre-DX9 hardware, and everybody else will have OpenGL 2.0 acceleration if they have Direct3D acceleration.

Molehill will run on Direct3D in Windows and OpenGL acceleration for Mac/Linux. After that, it will fallback to software 3D rendering.

...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?

> Unless you think this wasn't motivated by <canvas> and WebGL getting more attention.

Maybe DirectAnimation, VRML, Unity3D?

Tons of people make 3D graphic games in Flash as early as in 2000. <canvas> and WebGL just made Flash evolute quicker.

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.

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.

I agree, the 'first half' is a pretty big window and Adobe missed their AIR on Android release by months. That said 2011 is eleven years before 2022 ;)

Love the name. The implication that Apple is making a mountain out of something, perchance?

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