Rein: I can't blame you if you couldn't imagine a Facebook game at this level before today
The Flash edition of Unreal Tournament 3 looks superior to the PS3 and 360 versions that were released four years ago, Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has said.
In early October, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney took stage at Adobe's Max 2011 event to demonstrate Unreal Tournament 3 running through a browser in real time.
The feat was made possible with Adobe’s Flash Player 11, which utilises a hardware accelerated, programmable graphics pipeline. That means triple-A-style content can run on a web browser application that’s no bigger than a few megabytes.
The sheer astonishment of Epic running current gen games in Flash led some to believe that Sweeney’s demonstration was smoke-and-mirrors, but Rein says the achievement was real.
“I can’t blame you if you couldn’t imagine a Facebook game at the level of Unreal Tournament 3 before today,” he told Develop.
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“We’re not just talking about triple-A console quality on the web, we’re actually showing it onscreen, in a web browser, playing inside Flash.
“We chose as our demo a fully playable level from Unreal Tournament 3, and it turned out to look even better than the version we shipped on Xbox 360 and PS3, with improvements like global illumination, better shadows, and god rays.”
Unreal Tournament 3, published by Midway across 2007 and 2008, was said to have suffered from technical problems during its frantic multi-platform development. However, the game recieved positive critical reception upon release.
Rein said Epic is “just getting started” with its work on Flash. It is not known if Unreal Tournament 3 will be released in full on Flash.
Why use Flash when clearly HTML5 is the future? Also, Flash is way too slow and unoptimized for older PC's (more than 3 yrs of age).
Given that we've had browser plugins such as Unity, InstantAction and Torque available for free to independent developers for maybe five years now - even Macromedia Director had 3d acceleration - surely this is just retrofitting old ideas into outdated technologies to try and revive a dying product?
Adobe would be much better off absorbing Scaleform if they wanted to cash in on the games industry.
HTML the future for games on the web? For web apps definitely, but for games... heh maybe in 10 years. Making a game for HTML 5 is like developing a game for 10 different consoles. And what's worse is that these 10 consoles keep changing. You've got IE going to have a brand new edition every year and keeping suport for it for several years afterwards. With just IE alone, thats 5+ extra browsers in just a couple years. I'd rather make a great game and not constantly worry about Firefox, IE or Chrome changing a css tag or waiting for the spec to be completed in 10 years heh.
Petar, if you honestly believe you can create content like this with HTML5 then I really pity your industry knowledge.
And for anyone who knows slightly more than Petar, before you speak, WebGL is NOT HTML5.
ugh... every time i read a retarded comment like Petar's i fear for the future. you get one douche-bag celebrity-CEO writing his "thoughts" then all of a sudden his legions of iFaithful come clamouring for the death of something they don't even use!
Petar. HTML5 is Flash from the 90s and HTML5 animation on mobile devices is laughable, so how in the hell do you imagine that Unreal Tournament 3 would be a good idea for HTML5? please educate yourself.
Oh and another thing Unity and the others aren't much of a better option as developers have been finding that players are unwilling to wait to download their players and Flash is far more common.
If the general public would put down the games and actually pick up books about the topics they post, you wouldn't see Petarded comments like all this gibberish about HTML5. HTML5 will be great, but its no replacement for flash, especially since cross-browser inconsistencies will be a pain in the butt for years to come. The very reason why Flash has been so successful for over ten years.
Unreal 3 on html5?? seriously people like this detroys future... Go to school and learn something.
1. porting a million odd lines of c to javascript- good luck
2. javascript code can be modified very very easily compared to flash..bad for games
3. if flash is slow on and old pc...its because it is an old pc.
4....100 can't be bothered
html5 has is place... running unreal engine is not part of it...not yet anyway maybe check back in a few years
Seriously?!? This is not a very big achievement here. Ok... Follow me. This would be like saying, "Unreal Tournament 3 is now playable on PC through an EXE file that's only a few megabytes! WOW!!!" No.... not wow. The only thing amazing here is that Adobe finally warmed up to the PC crowd and allowed more access to your hardware, like the GPU. Flash isn't doing any crazy magic here, your PC is still doing all the work. This isn't any different from buying and installing the game on your computer. The ONLY difference is you have to download all the assets before playing. More waiting, less installing.
