Interactive 3D on the Web (again) - Unity
3D on the web has always been a peculiarity. Since the early days of VRML there has been a great desire from content creators to make 3D environments, games and interfaces. The first real mainstream attempt was Shockwave3D, which provided a solid authoring environment, physics, cross-platform, decent speed and engine features, great exporters for Max and Maya - yet this has been left to die for years with almost no improvements to the engine that now seems archaic. There have been many, many alternatives that have come along since (virtools, blitz, wildtangent) each of which have failed to really capture all the requirements an have not really taken off online (although Virtools is certainly very capable for creating executable content).
While having a look at the old Shockwave 3D list, there were a few posts discussing the defection of Tom Higgins to Unity, a company that creates a interactive 3D / game engine product - the engine used to create games such as Gooball. Tom was the Product manager for Director and worked tirelessly to support the community and worked very hard to get the Shockwave 3D engine updated. His departure is significant in that it suggests that the 3D side of Director is effectively abandonded.
Anyway, Adobe’s loss is Unitys gain, and having had a brief look at their product it looks rather nice. The biggest pecularity is that the authoring environment is OSX only. Very odd decision given the game developer base on windows. That said it can be easily published to a windows/OSX executable, web page (again, plugins for windows and OSX) and even a widget (perhaps pointless). It certainly looks like it has a lot going for it - a very modern graphics engine (Pixel Shaders, render-to-texture, blend modes etc etc), the integration of the Ageia PhysX physics engine, very fast code execution (it uses Mono) and more. Its a bit pricy (1500 dollars for the full version, although only 250 for the ‘indie’ version).
Theres a nice bunch of demos online here that show off what it can do - or just download the trial version here.
4 Comments
handcircus on May 4th, 2007
Hey foo foo,
Its interesting to see they are doing something, but it looks like its mainly aimed at compatibility initially (as they say “We will NOT upgrade the 3D feature set in the forthcoming Director release. “).
I loved Shockwave 3D when it first came out - and I hate that it has been left to rot the way it has. I was assuming they were going to come out with a replacement product since merging with Adobe, but perhaps not. Comparing Shockwave 3D with Unity now, the difference is quite ridiculous - I can’t see how they could catch up without starting again.
foo foo on May 4th, 2007
I agree, DirectX 9, Vista, and Mac/Intel support are compatibility features, but I think this is of indirect benefit to Shockwave 3D developers. Coding Director/Shockwave to be compatible across the different platforms is a huge undertaking and very difficult (I can’t even get the Unity Plugin to work on my Duo Core Inspiron) - as of course nobody can play your great browser-based FPS if it keeps crashing browsers.
But I have to disagree with your belief that Shockwave 3D is so far behind Unity. Have you seen some of the great Shockwave 3D games that have come out lately? Go to http://www.shockwave3d.com and check them out, I think you’ll be surprised.
infocyde on January 25th, 2008
I got the unity plugin to work fine on my HP dual core dv9225us. But I tossed vista and went back to XP, maybe that has something to do with things. I love the potential of Unity, but I think it is a different beast then Director. Unity seems to be for game dev only, where with Director/Shockwave it seems that you can do a lot more then game dev, and you can do 2D game dev where Unity looks like a 3D only environment. Again, I haven’t really used either yet, just researching. I’d like to see Director 11 come up, but from what I’ve been reading it is essentially varporware, with release dates pushed back endlessly. Still I will probably hold off buying Unity and give Director 11 a little bit more time, but not much. There is a port in the works for Unity on Windows as well, so by the time Unity 3D 3.0 comes out the dev environment might work on both platforms. Anyone know of a third option for web game development? I know Flash works, but there is no 3D support and it seems like Unity/Director are much better suited for game development.
foo foo on May 3rd, 2007
Hello, since your article was written Adobe has announced they plan to upgrade Director’s 3D capabilities. For Director 11 (coming soon) they will add DirectX 9 support, and a full upgrade of the engine will come sometime later.
I guess Adobe (unlike Macromedia before it) is seeing the huge potential of web based 3D. And given the fact that Shockwave 3D is now the de-facto standard for web based real-time 3D games, Adobe wants to take advantage of the situation.
You can read their posting here: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=11&catid=268&threadid=1243801&enterthread=y