Unreal Engine 3 comes to Flash

**weephun** · 10-04-2011, 02:44 PM

Ok, this is officially our week!

Today in Los Angeles our CEO & founder, Tim Sweeney, appeared on stage at the Adobe Max event to demonstrate Unreal Engine 3 running in Flash.

We’ve been working closely with Adobe on this technology for quite some time and today we are revealing it publicly. A few months ago when we decided we would do a demo for this event, we weren’t sure what we were going to show. The first content we decided to try in Flash was “Epic Citadel” and it ran amazingly well – better than we expected it would, considering how early on this was. But we began thinking that maybe a demo of content designed for mobile was setting expectations too low and we should aim higher.

So what did we do? We chose as our demo a fully playable level from Unreal Tournament 3 and it turned out to look even better than the version we shipped on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with improvements like global illumination, better shadows, and god rays! We’re not just talking about triple-A console quality on the web, we’re actually showing it onscreen, in a web browser, playing inside Flash!

I can’t blame you if you couldn’t imagine a Facebook game at the level of Unreal Tournament 3 before today. But know now that Unreal Engine 3 with Flash support is the technology that will enable experiences like this and we’re just getting started.

Can you tell I’m excited?

I expect Unreal Engine 3 developers to be equally thrilled about this. UE3 has earned recognition as the best game engine* for PC, console and mobile platforms and now we’re adding the web via Adobe Flash support. With more than 1,000,000 UDK installs, and many of the worlds’ best developers using UE3’s professional-strength tools, we’re sure to see amazing uses for this down the road.

There’s still some work to do before we can release this technology to developers and we’ll have more to talk about soon. We plan to continue working closely with Adobe and the long-term goal is to be able to bring amazing Samaritan-like experiences, and beyond, to web browsers through Flash.

So stay tuned for more news on this and other amazing developments here and on Facebook and Twitter. It’s going to be Unreal and you’re an Unreal Insider now!

Mark Rein,
Vice President, Epic Games.

Canadian-born Mark Rein is vice president and co-founder of Epic Games based in Cary, NC. Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 has won Game Developer magazine’s Best Engine Front Line Award seven times including entry into the Hall of Fame. UE3 has won three consecutive Develop Industry Excellence Awards. Epic is the creator of the mega-hit “Unreal” series of games and the blockbuster “Gears of War” franchise. Follow @MarkRein on Twitter.

What kind of Unreal Engine games would you like to see running in Flash?

*Current winner of both major industry engine awards: Game Developer magazine’s Front Line award for Best Engine and the Develop Industry Award for Best Engine. UE3 has won seven Front Line awards and has won the Develop award every year since its inception and even won the award that preceded it. In fact UE3 has won more than 20 major industry awards. We’re not talking business accolades here (Epic has won many of those, too) but actual awards for being the best engine.

**Godzab** · 10-04-2011, 02:55 PM

Support for IOS, Mac, and Flash, and you guys give this for free. You guys rock!

**darthviper107** · 10-04-2011, 02:56 PM

My boss will be excited about this.

**esset** · 10-04-2011, 03:23 PM

This is great news!

Will this be a part of the UDK, too? Any estimate on when?

**Tom P** · 10-04-2011, 03:26 PM

Thats not really cool. The whole world tries to get HTML5 established and now that. Flash is a mess and destroys resources like NOTHING else.
Very very uncool move, HTML5 also uses OpenGL ES 2.0, why not this way ?
Browsers begin skipping support for flash and Epic releases a flash based Unreal Engine, i ask myself how much Adobe paid for this nonsense.

**darthviper107** · 10-04-2011, 03:41 PM

Originally Posted by Tom P

Thats not really cool. The whole world tries to get HTML5 established and now that. Flash is a mess and destroys resources like NOTHING else.
Very very uncool move, HTML5 also uses OpenGL ES 2.0, why not this way ?
Browsers begin skipping support for flash and Epic releases a flash based Unreal Engine, i ask myself how much Adobe paid for this nonsense.

Considering very few things use HTML5, this isn't a bad move in any way

**hunharibo** · 10-04-2011, 03:58 PM

What about Android support already. That would be a lot better than flash.

**raian** · 10-04-2011, 04:02 PM

This engine gets better every time I look up! You guys always remind me I've made a great choice to choose to develop games with UDK. There's only one feature left that I really want more than anything, and that's UDK support for Android.