Happy 2009 everyone! I just wanted to quickly thank John Grden (site architecture), Keith Peters (3D books and video section), Lizzie Martin (production) and Rebecca Allen (Art Direction and Design) for their hard work on the newest features on infrared5.com. We’ve released some brand new content which I think is pretty cool, so go check it out when you have a chance. More to come on this front in the next couple of months! Stay tuned!
I’m sure by now many of you have seen John Grden’s post on Unity and how he thinks that Adobe should buy them. If you haven’t, then I suggest you read it. The post goes into the reasons that John, Andy and the rest of us at Infrared5 think that Unity is a really viable platform, and a major competitor to Flash, in particular for entertainment based sites. Of course being able to deploy to the iPhone is a major feature as well.
What’s interesting is the amount of positive feedback John got in the comments. Lee Brimelow from Adobe had some interesting feedback and some questions as well:
“So I’ve played with the IDE a little and looked at the (amazing) examples. But are you guys seeing this as a potential Flash replacement, or just as an alternative for doing 3D games?
I guess what I mean is can this engine build RIAs and all the other stuff Flash can do? Flash was never intended to be the best place to make 3D games. Of course the work John and the PV3D guys have done have changed that quite a bit. But there has always been better places to make 3D games in the browser, including our very own Director product.
Another point to throw out there is even if we did, or could, get a technology like this, what would we do with it? Roll it all into the Flash Player? Keep it as a separate 3D game plugin?
BTW, I’m asking these questions because I honestly don’t know the answers. I’m looking for feedback on what you guys think.”
Great questions Lee! Here’s my take on this:
This comment in particular struck me as strange: “Flash was never intended to be the best place to make 3D games.” Flash in its early stages was intended as an animation tool for the web, and this evolved into many other things throughout its life due to people in the community taking the technology and pushing it in new directions. I’m very certain that the original creators of Future Splash weren’t thinking of creating a tool for building Rich Internet Applications. 3D is just the latest breakthrough by the community (Papervision3D, Away3D, etc…)
Unity is obviously much better at rendering 3D than Flash at the moment, but it also has other less apparent advantages that could be exploited.
The networking layer is one huge difference. Instead of taking a proprietary approach with streaming media (RTMP and all its variants), Unity uses open standards (Ogg Vorbis), supports full UDP, and it supports true peer to peer with no additional service/server needed like Adobe’s new RTMFP protocol. So in addition to 3D/Games sites, I can really see Unity taking off in the world of streaming media as well. Flash still has some advantages in this area including accessing the webcam and microphone of a client’s computer and being able to stream that, but one would hope that this is a feature that Unity is also looking at adding in the future.
So, now to RIAs. Currently the Flash platform has a clear advantage in this area, but that doesn’t mean that folks in the community aren’t going to start building UI components for Unity. Once this happens, who knows what Unity might look like a few years from now.
Whether Adobe decides to buy Unity or not, they should clearly look at this as competition and learn from it.
As always, I would love to hear feedback from the community on this, as well as from Unity and Adobe respectively.
Yesterday I was chatting with Ted Patrick about iPhone development, and how our company Infrared5 is starting to develop games for the platform. We are currently using Unity 3D, as it’s very powerful and has a nice way to deploy to the iPhone runtime, and the 3D support is amazing. I pointed out to Ted that all Adobe really needs to do is create binaries from the SWF that work as an iPhone application. Essentially doing this the same way Unity is now. So the workflow would be something like this:
Paul Tondeur recently posted on his experiments in implementing RTMP in C# on the Unity3D platform. Paul and his team have a great start on some really exciting ways of creating multi-user 3D content for the web, and I commend them on sharing what they are up to.
So, why would you want to do this in the first place? Unity3D simply adds many capabilities that Flash can’t currently handle on the 3D and graphics front, and if that’s not enough, Unity3D can be deployed on the iPhone. But, Flash still has its place as well given it’s ubiquity and ease with which you can create great UIs.
Creating communication with Flash, Unity3D and Red5 has been something we’ve been looking into as well at Infrared5. We are thinking of taking a different approach than Paul on this, and will simply add Unity support directly to Red5. By doing so we can start to take advantage of some of the protocols that Unity Supports like UDP, which simply isn’t possible with the RTMP protocol.
If anyone has any good open source examples of servers written to work with Unity I would appreciate a link. We will be sure to keep people posted on our progress. I’m sure that Red5, Flash and Unity3D have a bright future together.
Well, it’s not a real airplane, and it’s made of paper (OK pixels then), but it’s damn fun to fly. It also shows off some killer interaction that can be done with Flash. Check out the newest addition to the Infrared5 site by clicking on “FLY ME” at the top right corner of a page once the site has loaded.
Thanks to Rebecca Allen for the great design/concept, and to John Grden and Andy Zupko for taking on the challenge to build this. Dominick Accattato also made a great blog post on the subject.
Expect some more exciting additions to http://infrared5.com soon.
