unity3d as a development tool for three-dimensional flash applications

On Habré passed unnoticed event quite significant in the gamedev'a world - unity3d was updated to version 3.5 . Among other things, this release has the opportunity to compile projects under the Adobe Flash platform.
What does this give game developers and what opportunities does digital advertising offer?

About all of this to tell, at least briefly, will be completely superfluous. Moreover, you can still download the version with the exporter for flash absolutely free. With the exit from the “developer preview”, this feature will cost you some money.
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Welcome to all the curious under habrakat!

It makes no sense to talk about the unity3d engine itself, there are enough articles on this topic on Habré. The release of version 3.5 was very welcome and brought a number of nice innovations.
By themselves, they are quite worthy of a separate story, I just briefly mention them:

• new particle system shuriken: completely rewritten particles, with great potential;
• own pathfinding, very fast and enjoyable;
• light probes - pseudo light from the walls, greatly improves the picture and is fairly cheap in performance;
• native support for rendering in HDR and gamma correction;
• native LOD system;
• Google Native Client support - among other things, making it possible to create projects under linux by launching them from google chrome

Well, the most interesting and interesting thing - an exporter appeared under Adobe Flash!



Flash, as a platform for browser games, the most popular in the world. No matter what anyone says, it is installed on the vast majority of client machines. Since this plugin is the most common, it is logical that it has the widest audience on the Internet.

In addition, existing popular playgrounds originally sharpened by flash. Such monsters as Kongregate and Armor Games, social networks - facebook, VKontakte, etc. They give a huge army of players and everyone has an Adobe player. Yes, here it can be argued that, they say, the same Kongregate places games on unity3d, and on social networks, products of this kind are no longer uncommon. But! Not everyone has a unity player and not everyone is in a hurry to install it for themselves.
A developer wants to have the widest possible audience.

Now you can port your (ready) project from unity to flash using the minimum amount of effort. But still not everything is smooth and perfect, there are things that have not yet been implemented. This is just a version of the “developer preview” and it can be expected that everything will be much better for the release.

Another very attractive feature of the flash platform is that it is the most advanced platform for beautiful user interfaces (GUI).
Interfaces on flash to do easier, faster and simply cheaper. They are rich in animation, all sorts of beautiful transitions and play. It is much easier to find a specialist animator in flash than programmers who, spitting and muting, will debug such “ryushki” as animation and effects in the GUI. Far-sighted "Scaleform" not for nothing earn on their product .
Now, developers at unity also have such an opportunity.

If you look in the direction of advertising companies and their promotional sites - big brands would almost never agree to make a website, a configurator or a showroom on questionable (in terms of plug-in prevalence) technologies like unity3d, shiva, nebula, etc. Yes, there were attempts, someone did something and perhaps even successfully, but the audience coverage always suffered. Now it has become possible.

Clients (in this case, these are advertising agencies) will absolutely not care what the product is designed for. It will be away3d, alternativa3d or your own child - only the result will be important.
The choice of course always remains for the developer, but in my opinion the unity fits this role perfectly. The speed of development of products on it is much higher, respectively, and low cost.



Now about the technical side of things. Of course, as I mentioned, not everything is perfect.
I suggest to judge for yourself whether the list of features is sufficient. Here is a list from the developers site (in this place I thought for a long time and decided not to translate the terms into Russian, all one, many terms are untranslatable)

Supported by:

• Lightmapping
• Occlusion culling
• Basic scripting
• Editor scripting (JavaScript / C # / Boo). Note: for JavaScript, use #pragma strict.
• Custom shaders
• Animation / skinning
• Basic audio features such as AudioSource / AudioListener
• Physics
• Navigation meshes
• Baked substance textures
• Playerprefs
• UnityGUI, except for text input
• Realtime shadows

Not supported:

• Unity profiler
• Asset bundles
• Text input in UnityGUI
• WWW classes. Note that you can write your own Adobe Networking APIs.
• Raknet networking (if you need it, you can write it in Action Script 3 directly, using flash API)
• Terrain
• Cloth
• Using VertexLit shaders in combination with:
  - Specular highlights
  - Spot lights
  - Emissive material color
• Advanced audio features such as audio effects. Also pitch manipulation is not supported.
• Deferred rendering
• AnimationEvents that carry arguments

Partially supported:

• Image Effects. Some work, some don't.
• Not all parts of .NET scripting work (lambda expressions and LINQ are not supported, for example)
• GUIText will have a dramatic impact on performance
• Shuffken API

As you can see, it is not possible to port any project at the moment, but most of it is possible. I tried to collect several projects that were already under development, under flash, and most of them eventually came together.

Look at what is already possible today on the website of the company itself. It presents an excellent selection of entries.

Also, here you can see what I managed to achieve from the second version of the shaders (the car from the picture to the post).

You can get acquainted with the list of all features of version 3.5 here .

I will be glad to answer questions in the comments.

Thank you for reading to the end!