Epic's UE3 Runs Within Adobe's New Flash 11

Adobe first teased us with Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 at the end of September, promising "console-quality" 2D and 3D games over the Internet to Google's Android, Apple's iOS, the BlackBerry Tablet OS, Mac OS, Windows, connected TVs and other platforms. Given that many popular Flash-based games are simplistic in nature, this seemed like a bold promise to make. If anything, it sounded as if Adobe planned to take on streaming services like Gaikai and OnLive.

"Full hardware-accelerated rendering for 2D and 3D graphics enable 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2," Adobe said. "Developers are able to animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver console-quality games on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions. A pre-release brings these same accelerated 2D and 3D capabilities to mobile platforms including Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS. A production release for mobile platforms is expected in the near future."

Now both Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 are available to download and install, and could possibly change the face of online gaming whether it's social or hardcore. Even more, Tuesday Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 3 can run inside an Adobe Flash-based environment, allowing gamers to play titles like Unreal Tournament 3 within a web browser on low-end machines. Epic Games Chief Executive Officer, Founder and Technical Director Tim Sweeney today demonstrated this possibility during a keynote at Adobe MAX 2011, Adobe’s annual conference for developers, designers and business leaders.

Latest Videos FromTom's Hardware

Watch full video here:

"Flash Player is a key technology for gaming on social networks and the Web, and with UE3 will usher in the leap from simplistic 2D game experiences to world-class 3D gaming on the Web," the company added. "With its new hardware-accelerated Stage 3D APIs, Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10. Developers can now animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver console-quality games on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions."

To get Adobe Flash Player 11, head here; Adobe Air 3 can be downloaded by heading here. After that, there are a number of demos that you can test including Zombie Tycoon, MAX Racer (which is a 145 MB download for high resolution), Delta Strike's four space battle demos, and Tanki Online Version 2 -- other demos don't seem to work with the final build. So far there's no indication of when we'll see the likes of Unreal Tournament 3 on Facebook or some other Flash 11-enabled website, so stay tuned.

TOPICS

Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.

14 Comments Comment from the forums

killerclick

I thought Flash was dead and it was all HTML5 from now on? What's this then?
Reply
CaedenV

They can claim UE3 graphics, but then there is nothing of any notable quality in the video, and some of the games that were shown were choppy. Hardly what I would call impressive, but still a great leap forward.

Props to Adobe for doing something good, but no good overselling it.
Reply
cmartin011

o man html 5 and adobe are going to battle to the bitter end. i love it lol
Reply
Prince_Porter

This, is the reason why I said people jumping to html5 as the future for browser gaming were just being ignorant. Adobe was in control, and saw a threat, they weren't about to sit back and watch html5 drive by them. They saw a threat, and jumped way ahead before that threat even arrived, as any smart company would with that large of a heads up. html5 will still probably rule for videos, and everything but games, but browser games are still going to be flash, and that's not going to change for a long time. Armor Games, Newgrounds, Addicting Games, Kongregate, Bubblebox, Notdoppler, all of these guys are HUGE players in the flash game industry, they're not building companies around tech that's about to die out, think about it. Gamestop just bought Kongregate, you think their top analysts didn't look into flash and it's future? Nobody that big buys a smaller company that is about to be using worthless tech.
Reply
-Fran-

Great, so to use the hardware at our disposal we just add more useless layers for rendering and throw away power.

Jeez... It's no feat to run UE3 inside a browser, it's just a waste of resources!

This whole "HTML5 vs Adove" thing is just stupid. It's like talking about OGL vs DX in the early days ALL OVER AGAIN!

Cheers! >_
Reply
eddieroolz

That's great. Can Adobe also make Flash 11 not so demanding on the PC?
Reply
f-14

meh, everything has the look of 1999 kids games
oh look steve jobs does not want to support flash and apples #1 one game is yep a game that runs on flash, because there's only so much angry birds you can play before it sucks!
what game is that at 1:25 - 1:33 because if that is the diablo3 beta i'm going to be pissed.

Reply
bigo65

Call me when they run the Samaritan demo in Flash.
Reply
html5, as I understand is still in middle of development, and standardization process. Parts already available for testing, but it's probably too buggy and too much vulnerable for exploits to be deployed in production.
Reply
demonhorde665

wow , looks liek i'l need to finally upgrade my adobe flash pro for school . that said , i knew adobe was going to come up with soe way to make flash remain relivant to the market. even if they started workign on this for html 5 it would set them back majorly to try to incorperate similar rfeatures into it at this point .
Reply

Show more comments