I keep expecting to hear any day now that Adobe has purchased Unity. Their ideas behind content creation and authoring are really in line with each other, and 3D content creation is sorely lacking in the Adobe lineup.
Very good point - that would make perfect sense. It would fill a big hole in the Flash developer tools, and if Unity were refocused to Flash, it would give Flash a huge boost: Get all those Unity developers working on Flash, indirectly at first, but they would eventually write the UI for their games in Flash and so forth. And it would make them less likely to use other game platforms.
I would be happier if Unity exported to HTML5, and I assume that would be unlikely if Adobe bought Unity. But from Adobe's perspective buying Unity would be the right thing to do.
Actually I would've expected Autodesk to be a more fitting suitor given how easy it is to get into Unity if you already know Maya. The controls and hotkeys are identical between Maya and Unity and all character modeling, rigging, texturing and animating is imported seamlessly from Maya -> Unity. If anything, I'm waiting for Autodesk and Adobe to merge somehow.
I'm definitely impressed, I don't think I've seen a Flash game that looks as good.
I honestly don't know much about Unity or the technology but my first concern is performance. Adobe tried the "write once, run everywhere" and while they were successful, performance suffered. How will something much more complex and demanding perform?
The performance answer is a tricky one. Unity maintains their own web player plugin, which runs with native performance: http://unity3d.com/webplayer/
My guess is big players--Battlestar Galactica Online, Tiger Woods Online--will use the Flash player export as a fallback. Depending on its shipping performance, and how demanding the content is, developers may even fork the content for each player individually. Regardless of multiple versions of content, it would probably make sense to push users into downloading the Unity Web Player for better performance.
Unity is also working on a NaCl port. In a year, 3D web game developers may be able to offer the Unity/Flash/NaCl versions simultaneously (prioritized by browser/performance/compatibility).
In general, Unity is well-positioned to exploit other platforms as they emerge. If they can manage this Flash export, they can probably manage anything...
[Full disclosure: I'm a long-time Unity user, and I help them organize proposals/sessions for their Unite conference, but I don't actually work at Unity]
> I'm definitely impressed, I don't think I've seen a Flash game that looks as good.
I assume the main reason is that 3D in Flash (Molehill) is very recent? Now that Flash has that capability, you can write a game that looks like that in Flash directly, Unity is not strictly necessary (although it might be a useful game engine on top of Flash).
Assuming Flash provides fairly clean access to the underlying hardware, performance should be as good as you can expect given the intermediate abstraction layer.
On a side note, it would be nice if Unity produced iOS apps that could be extended as easily using Obj-C / CocoaTouch the way it looks like you can work with native AS3 code.
From my brief experience with unity I would say that it probably has a ways to go before it rivals games like Infinity Blade (which uses Unreal) on mobile devices. I would say that there shouldn't be any performance issues with console or computer games built on unity.
What I would like to see is Unity being able to export to HTML5. In principle this should be possible using Emscripten/Mandreel/etc. Performance should be comparable to Flash on modern browsers (unless they have some special optimizations for the Flash VM they are working on with Adobe).
One issue is the lack of multithreading with shared state in JavaScript. I'm not sure if Flash supports that? In any case I assume something like Unity should be able to be ported to such a platform (you can still do multithreading using workers, but you must use message passing).
I'd love to see this, but WebGL is such a mess right now, my PC can hardly handle even simple stuff in it. It's just not ready yet. The average user can't get the same performance from HTML/Canvas/WebGL as they can with Flash/Molehill.
Not having used Unity before, I wondered how it compared to WebGL. It seems as though Unity provides it's own 3D framework to make authoring much simpler:
It has built in character controllers, water simulation, particles, a physics engine and more.
It takes a fraction of the time to make a game in Unity as it would do in Molehill [Flash] or WebGL.
