Flash Player Molehill preview released

I view this development very positively. Flash is being positioned as being the cutting edge in browser gaming. With Linux support too!<p>It will take years for browsers to catch up and in the meanwhile we have the capability of hosting games as complex as MMOs like World of Warcraft within a browser all with one fairly universal browser plugin.<p>It's time for browser games to move past sprites and tiles.

Unity announced they are working on Flash Player export via Molehill (and presumably Adobe Alchemy): <a href="http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-web/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/02/27/unity-flash-3d-on-the-we...</a>

If you install the Incubator release of the player, there are some live demos to try out at <a href="http://away3d.com/away3d-4-0-alpha-release-broomstick" rel="nofollow">http://away3d.com/away3d-4-0-alpha-release-broomstick</a>

Advanced 3D in Flash has been an attractive idea for some time. I'm surprised Adobe didn't release this earlier in advance of WebGL as a possible competitor.

Zombie Tycoon: <a href="http://molehill.zombietycoon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://molehill.zombietycoon.com/</a>

Can anyone find online documentation? I want to know how it compares to WebGL. Is it OpenGL-like, DirectX-like, or a wacky new API? What shader language is supported? Is GPGPU possible? What's their story on extensions? Do they support compressed textures, floating-point textures, non-power-of-two textures, vertex texture fetch?<p>Edit: the best thing I've found so far is here: <a href="http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2555" rel="nofollow">http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2555</a> Apparently Adobe invented their own wacky new API and shader language, which seems like a questionable decision. Still looking for something more detailed.

Finally, 3D at an affordable cost! (I hope)<p>Flash has always been great for experimental games. In a few hours you can make a functioning prototype, upload it to a big website and let people see your work. I look at Kongregate and Newgrounds as the programmer's equivalent of deviantART.<p>I would love to see HTML5 catch up with this one day, but until that I'll be using Flash to play with. And now with more liberty!

If you are having performance problems, make sure you have "Enable Hardware Acceleration" checked on the right-click -&#62; settings -&#62; display menu.

This can all be done in HTML5 :)