Unity Technologies says that it is not concerned that Epic Games has followed its lead by supporting Adobe Flash in its Unreal Engine.
Earlier this week Epic CTO Tim Sweeney showed Unreal Tournament III running in a Flash-based environment during his keynote address at Adobe Max 11 in Los Angeles. The move, powered by Flash Player 11 and its Stage 3D APIs which can render graphics a thousand times faster than its predecessor, means games with console-quality graphics will be playable in web browsers, something Unity has already done this year.
It announced that it would be adding Flash export to its Unity platform in February, and showed it in action using its open-source shooter Angry Bots (pictured above) at last week's Unite 11 conference in San Francisco. In an email, David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies, told us he believed there was ample room in the marketplace for Unity3D as well as Unreal Engine.
"Our focus at Unity is to democratise game development and enable all types of developers to create wonderful experiences that can be published to any relevant platform," he told us. "This is why we started working on Flash support early this year and demonstrated Unity running a really complex game on top of Flash in September. As of this week Stage 3D is launched out of beta, and we are going to support it as soon as we can.
"Unreal has a very different approach, but their goals have also led them to support Stage 3D. I don't think either company is worried too much about the other competing in the same space."
The Flash update does much to dispel claims of its imminent demise, that it is set to be replaced by HTML5, which is capable of performing the same tasks on a wide variety of devices including those made by the famously Flash-sceptic Apple. Research has already shown that it is too early for HTML5 to become the de facto standard, and while Helgason still believes that it will one day take Flash's place, Stage 3D remains the short-term option of choice.
"Adobe has taken a lot of criticism for innovating," he told us, "and indeed HTML5 got 3D graphics before Flash. But with Stage 3D Adobe has really upped the game and created a solid foundation to run pretty high-performance 3D games on.
"HTML5 will not lose momentum because of this, but in the short term we absolutely think that Stage 3D is the better platform and therefore we decided to enable our developers to build games for it (on top of all the other platforms we support)."