If Flash is Molehill, then Unity is Mountain
Well the Adobe MAX keynote came and went. After dragging out the presentation thru 4 moderate areas of interest, they finally got to what I really care about, Games. They spent only about 10-15min showing what we may be able to do someday and everybody ejaculated all over themselves, but I believe that to be premature.
Here is what they didn’t tell you, but I can read thru the lines. First, as with most things Flash this will still require a 3rd party or OS project to really render your worlds. Of course you could write you own engine, but isn’t that what we expected this next-generation API to do for us? Second, they didn’t even hint at a tool. Have you ever done 3D? Ever try to do it all in your head? Good luck! Isn’t it easier to have a tool to see visually whats happening and edit on the fly? Director was always like this, Unity too. But Flash we always have to compile down, test, tweak something and recompile – repeat this tired loop until you get it just right. Sure there are 3rd party tools to do this at runtime and other methods for such manipulation, but shouldn’t our tool do this for us? Seb-Lee Delisle recently wrote an article Flash vs Flash about how the tool conflicts with some initiatives of the platform. I always pondered similar things such as why anyone would use youtube to convert a swf animation to video at all? I digress.
Again, what should be taken away from this grand announcement is it won’t be available soon. They say first half of of 2011 for a beta program. I’d say don’t expect it long before June 30th. Remember when they announced at MAX 2009 iphone packager was going to be a public beta by the end of last year? Expect similar treatment. They’ve damn near guaranteed it will be difficult to use as it is just a low-level API and is NOT an engine. Oh yea go watch this video in which he say the physics are ActionScripted. WTF? Are you telling me along with this great new API that I have to code an engine in, I also get to code 3D physics to make my world work? Wow! Thanks Adobe for just tripling my workload before I even begin my game.
If 3D in Flash is a molehill, then Unity is my mountain in which I will stay atop.
