Flash Player Molehill preview released | Hacker News Reader

Flash Player Molehill preview released

labs.adobe.com

40 pointshakim21 comments

I view this development very positively. Flash is being positioned as being the cutting edge in browser gaming. With Linux support too!

It will take years for browsers to catch up and in the meanwhile we have the capability of hosting games as complex as MMOs like World of Warcraft within a browser all with one fairly universal browser plugin.

It's time for browser games to move past sprites and tiles.

Should the universal browser plugin be Flash or NaCl?

Flash is more than a browser plugin; Flash brings a mature developer ecosystem (developers, designers, Adobe and third-party tools).

Unity announced they are working on Flash Player export via Molehill (and presumably Adobe Alchemy): http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-we...

This is a really smart move for them. The value of unity has always been in the authoring environment and not the runtime.

If you install the Incubator release of the player, there are some live demos to try out at http://away3d.com/away3d-4-0-alpha-release-broomstick

After watching some videos on their website I was completely amazed. The opportunities that this API creates are amazing. I can't wait to see some 3D games for the browser. Adobe is pushing the limits again by incorporating some very low level graphics APIs. Recently it also updated the Flash player with stage video that also takes use of the GPU. Flash has always been just that, it brought to the user what the browser alone did not.

Advanced 3D in Flash has been an attractive idea for some time. I'm surprised Adobe didn't release this earlier in advance of WebGL as a possible competitor.

Zombie Tycoon: http://molehill.zombietycoon.com/

Can anyone find online documentation? I want to know how it compares to WebGL. Is it OpenGL-like, DirectX-like, or a wacky new API? What shader language is supported? Is GPGPU possible? What's their story on extensions? Do they support compressed textures, floating-point textures, non-power-of-two textures, vertex texture fetch?

Edit: the best thing I've found so far is here: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2555 Apparently Adobe invented their own wacky new API and shader language, which seems like a questionable decision. Still looking for something more detailed.

It's probably a good decision. OpenGL is full of legacy baggage, even ES, and its shader language is modeled after C. Flash developers don't have the same skills to leverage as game developers, so they might as well start fresh.

You can download Adobe's AS3 docs (the flash.display3D package, in particular) here:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player_Incubator#...

"Mere mortal" developers probably will probably use the Molehill APIs through one of the many 3D frameworks for Flash:

http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2810

GPGPU is useless for mass gaming. The underpowered GPUs that will run most of the in-browser games will have trouble rendering the game itself, much less help with other tasks.

This is true for gaming applications in general, even on consoles and PCs with powerful cards. Game developers need the GPU to do graphics, and can find enough work for it.

Without mentionning they already have trouble finding tasks for the multiple cpus we already have.

Finally, 3D at an affordable cost! (I hope)

Flash has always been great for experimental games. In a few hours you can make a functioning prototype, upload it to a big website and let people see your work. I look at Kongregate and Newgrounds as the programmer's equivalent of deviantART.

I would love to see HTML5 catch up with this one day, but until that I'll be using Flash to play with. And now with more liberty!

If you are having performance problems, make sure you have "Enable Hardware Acceleration" checked on the right-click -> settings -> display menu.

This can all be done in HTML5 :)

No, it can't.

Some parts can, some not, some are better in HTML5 / WebGL, some are better in Flash / Molehill.

GPU bottlenecked things should be more or less similar, CPU bottlenecked things are currently faster in Flash.

Flash has more troubles integrating with the rest of the browser stack (DOM layers compositing).

According to sparse info so far, Molehill will be limited by DirectX 9 capabilities, which is also the case for WebGL with ANGLE rendering backend on Windows but not for WebGL with OpenGL rendering backend on Windows / Linux / OSX (these should have capabilities of OpenGL ES 2.0).

Which means if you have a high-end graphics card, you should be able to squeeze out more from it with WebGL. Also work-in-progress are WebGL extensions, which will expose even more GPU capabilities.

I would have thought that it was obvious that I wasn't serious about the HTML5 thing. I figured the smiley would have been the giveaway.

sigh Really? Good thing you threw that comment in. Now I know better.

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