The newly released Flash Player 11 from Adobe is supposed to be a huge leap forward in terms of running full 3D games. This week Epic Games announced that its popular Unreal Engine 3 game development tools have been adapted to run on Flash Player 11 which should allow a number of UE3-based games to be adapted to run inside web sites and other online applications. You can check out a demo of Unreal Engine 3 running on Flash Player 11 in the video below.
Adobe has previously announced that the new Flash Player 11 will have up to 1,000 times the performance of the previous version to run 2D and 3D games. Tim Sweeney, the head programmer for Epic Games, said in a press release, "With UE3 and Flash, games built for high-end consoles can now run on the Web or as Facebook apps, reaching an enormous user base. This totally changes the playing field for game developers who want to widely deploy and monetize their games."
In an interview with Gamasutra, Epic Games" president Mike Capps said that Epic has been working with Adobe for a while to get Unreal Engine 3 to run in a Flash-based application. Capps said, "We"ve been working with Adobe a long time on the tech. It"s a pretty hard thing to take 1 million-plus lines of code and get it to work in Flash." However he added that you shouldn"t expect the truly high end graphical titles like Epic"s Gears of War running in a browser, saying, "I think it"s going to be a little while before you see DirectX 10 running in browsers and Flash."