Flash Player 11 Capabilities
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- Boz0
Full list of Molehill / Flash Player 11 demos.. simply stunning
http://blog.theflashblog.com/?p=…Full Quake port Alchemy + Molehill:
http://q3fl.impulse12.com/"Few people realize how Molehill is about to be a revolution in the browser-based gaming industry. Currently the majority of video games playable in a web browser are in 2D. I think there are two main reasons for that : Flash did not support 3D hardware acceleration until now, and alternative technologies have not enough ubiquity to be seriously considered by developers.
Among the alternative technologies to make real-time 3D rendering in a web browser you find Shockwave for which there is a wide choice of games, Virtools perhaps a little more oriented toward professional market, or Unity which is certainly the most successful technology currently. It is also possible to use hardware acceleration with more common technologies such as Silverlight or Java with JOGL. Finally others choose to develop their own technology, which is the case for Quake Live for example. However, all suffer the same problem : a low penetration rate.
People have confidence in Flash because the term “Flash game” came into common parlance, and because everyone thinks that YouTube cannot run without Flash (even if there is an HTML 5 version), but when it comes to installing the Silverlight plugin this is another story... In practice the penetration of Flash 10 is now above 97% throughout the world. This means that if you develop a site or a Flash game, you can be sure that at least 97% of people on the planet will see your site the same way they use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Opera and even on their Android phone !! Can you say the same thing if you develop a site in HTML 5 ?
The only alternative seriously conceivable in medium term if we take into account the ubiquity is certainly WebGL as more and more browsers implement it and that its presence is transparent to the user. However WebGL suffers the same flaws as all standardized technologies under the name HTML 5 : first we’ve been talking about it for years (the design of Canvas 3D began in 2006) but the specifications are still not completed, and secondly as for all other “standards” nothing says that a program based on WebGL work the same way between two browsers.
Actually I understand that we use HTML to make static websites or forms rather quickly. But when it comes to making a more complex website, a game, or web application, I do not understand how a developer can seriously be considering doing this in Java Script seeing all the problems it poses : clarity of language, existence of a standard API fully documented, cross-browser compatibility, performance across browsers... In comparison Action Script 3, Flash’s programming language, is overall similar to Java Script except it is cleaner because typed and more strict.
Furthermore the AVM2, virtual machine in Flash, has truly remarkable performances. The first port of Quake done using Alchemy sought to highlight those performances. Note that a program written in C/C++ and compiled for the AVM2 through Alchemy, or even coded in AS3 but well optimized, it can actually have as announced on Adobe’s website performance just 2 to 10 times lower than the same program compiled to native code. To convince yourself I invite you to test this first port of Quake. It is still far from the performance of the Java virtual machine, but I'd be very surprised if Google’s V8 or Opera’s Carakan were able to do so.
Besides for those who think, as Steve Jobs, that Flash drains the battery of cellphones, I invite you to play Pirates Love Daisies. This is an online game coded in Java Script and based on HTML 5. Look how long your cellphone lasts on this game compared to a similar game in Flash, I think it's equivalent. Sure navigating a Flash site consumes more than remaining on a static HTML page, but there are no free lunches, having quality content is resource intensive. Seriously you think your PC consumes as much electricity when you play Minesweeper as when you play Crysis ? Think again...
Nevertheless 2011 will be a revolutionary year for browser-based video games, and this revolution will be due to Molehill. There is a huge market to take, so get to your keyboards !"