Unreal Engine 3 now runs on Flash

Even though some believe (or wish) Flash is going the way of the dodo, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney surprises us by showing off a Flash-based version of Unreal Tournament 3. The port was made possible thanks to the hardware-accelerated 3D rendering support of the Stage3D API and other improvements in Flash 11.

Interestingly, Sweeney said the Flash-port of Unreal Tournament 3 will offer higher visual quality than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 editions, if your PC is powerful enough to handle it.

Epic Games Chief Executive Officer, Founder and Technical Director Tim Sweeney today presented the company’s award-winning Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) technology running fully inside an Adobe Flash-based environment during a keynote at Adobe MAX 2011, Adobe’s annual conference for developers, designers and business leaders. The live technical demonstration of “Unreal Tournament 3,” Epic’s blockbuster first-person shooter was visually enhanced for an unprecedented real-time experience inside Adobe Flash Player 11, which was released yesterday.

Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash Player Unreal Tournament 3Flash Player is a key technology for gaming on social networks and the Web, and with UE3 will usher in the leap from 2D game experiences to world-class 3D gaming on the Web. Developers can now animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver console-quality games on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions.

UE3 licensees will be able to access these new features that bring triple-A gaming to the Web. For more information about developing games for the Flash Platform with UE3, visit www.unrealengine.com.

A tech demo of Unreal Tournament III running in Firefox can be viewed below: