Hey guys, I’m having a blast learning Away3D and I’m incredibly excited about Flash 11.  So why am I not seeing more discussion and hype around the net?  Is it just me, or do you also find the general public and clients to be strangely quiet about what seems to me to be such a game changing update to Flash?

I mean, full 3D games on the web using Flash? Programming (as I am) using Blender->Prefab->Flash Develop-> Away3d->Flex SDK…completely open source pipeline into awesome results using AS3?

Maybe I need to get out more?

I hear ya. There was quite a buzz back in March when molehill was first released, and I think that buzz will be repeated in October when Adobe likely will announce the Flash Player 11 release.

One problem I think is the real lack of documentation either for working at the AGAL level or with frameworks like Away3D. I love Away3D but even after working with it all year, I still don’t have a clue how to use fundamental things like the Skeleton classes. The documentation black hole is really a concern to me. And to others it would seem since in 6 months I’ve only seen maybe a couple of complete games made in molehill. Lots of basic demos, but very few finished apps.

I really hope so.  It’s always so hard to tell what technologies will really take off.  Even this topic isn’t generating any comments and I expected the folks here to have some strong opinions about Molehill and the future of Flash.

I’ve used Unity 3D and of course the tools in Unity are extremely easy to use, but our clients were just adamant about not using their plugin, plus it’s expensive and every new version means more money for licenses.  So I’m really hoping Flash 3D just blows people away (and we plan to release a simple game in the next month to showcase Flash 11 in time for the release of the new player)  I’d love to just have 3D games using Flash become the new “it” thing.  It’s just so much fun to code!

We’ll see

I think the press, and a lot of developers are just tired of the wait. Molehill has used up it’s Wow factor, without actually being available. First previewed at MAX ‘10, it’s now time for MAX ‘11 and a year is a very long time these days.

I’m somewhat surprised there aren’t more members here on the Away3D forum. Unity does appear to have taken a huge slice of the Flash community who wanted to make 3D games, and the iOS block on FP has also been a major influence, business wise. Unity’s export to .swf really shows what’s possible with the new player and the right tools. The problem for Adobe is they don’t currently have a tool for working with 3D. That cuts out the casual, casual game maker, i.e. the IT hobbyist, who can download Unity for free and start making something without any other programs.

For developers for whom Open Source and Open Standards are the Holy Grail, there’s WebGL to contend with.

All in all the web 3D community is fragmented compared to when there was “just Flash” for making on-line games. I do hope Flash can win back some ground with the final release of F11. 

Choons, I agree you have to be pretty dedicated to use Away3D 4.0 with so little documentation. Maybe there’s a book in the works

well I’m certain there’s a book in the works. I understand that’s one of the only ways for the devs to get some financial compensation for all the work, but I hope documentation isn’t intentionally vague or absent for that reason. Also, I know McFunkypants is just about to release a book on how to develop an entire game at the AGAL level which I am very much looking forward to.

I agree with you about the frustration of waiting- a year is too long. The jump Adobe could have had on WebGL is evaporating fast

theMightyAtom:

Thanks for the update on Unity.  I missed that post and it’s good to see they are making progress on their Flash exporter!

There’s one thing that bugs me about how their tool will work, and that is you will be exporting all of their output as a single swf and won’t be able to fully leverage your existing classes?  According to some of the comments on that thread, you’ll load your Unity swf into a loading swf and them do communication via something like a local connection?  While it’s great that their tool will be able to make quick work of the 3D stuff, the cross swf communication seems like a pain and my experience with that stuff was that it always made things unnecessarily unstable, for instance when you update a function call and won’t get compiler errors if you miss something. 

Plus it doesn’t sound like that will be part of the free Indie version.

I’m sure you guys are like us, and you have some sort of custom framework you use to speed up development.  So far, adding in Away 3D has been painless.  It’s just about me learning the API.  But once I have all of that working, I’ll have the entire rest of my library already working:

Flash remoting
FMS/Red 5
Asset management

So I can leverage my existing asset loaders to include Away 3D content (in fact, I already have).

I’m not saying Unity isn’t awesome, but I can see tradeoffs.  So I guess it’s all about learning as much as we can until things shake out.

I don’t think WebGL is much of a threat.  It won’t be supported properly until long after HTML5/CSS3 are supported properly - and that’s taking its sweet time.

Flare3D is probably the only other thing to watch - having it’s own 3D modelling tool is a real selling point.  Prefab would be a viable alternative if I could figure out how it works (sorry Fabrice - but without a background in 3D it’s a complete mystery box).

Anyway - we know the time-tightrope the devs are walking.  They’ll have to get this live and stable before even thinking about a book.  Hopefully that will all come together in the coming month.

The general public knows nothing about flash player 11, as far as I know. People don’t even know that it uses the GPU. However, upon showing my friends the molehill demos such as the shallow water simulation, they were very impressed. They did not think these things were capable in real time, or in flash for that matter.

I went to a Zynga info session and one of the developers there told me that they had plans for some 3D social games using the new molehill api. It’s quite far off though since fp11 has yet to be released.

Unity is definitely doing well in the mobile market.

I don’t really see webgl taking off just because of the lack of I.E. support and programming in javascript is a pretty big pain when compared to other languages.

The transition to windows 8 will take a very long time. More and more people are using browsers other than I.E. Flash is fine for now.