Anyone played with Flash 10 beta yet? 3D!

The Flash 10 beta is available:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

It has hardware acceleration, custom image/vector/video filter language, very simple 3D (which will substantially accelerate 3D engines like PaperVision etc), better text support, and dynamic sound creation.

Sounds like Adobe have really listened to their users, and made major enhancements that will have some impact.

Anyone tried it out yet?

Please, if you hate Flash, please keep it to yourself. :)

didn't flash do 3d ages ago? or was that shockwave?

Shockwave. I'm pretty certain i've seen 3D in flash, too.

Looks cool.. :)

Gnash is coming along nicely too. YouTube etc works and I think flash 7 support is nearly complete. It is hardware accelerated (OpenGL). I'm still using the offical binary plugin, but it is quite unstable on linux.

It will be a nice update but it doesn't come with something like a real 3d engine. I guess you'll have to wait for Flash11 for that. Hydra is nice and their text engine improvements. There was a video from last year.

-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympeCv8lLmw

Some people might be missing the point. The hardware acceleration and simple 3D will mean that any existing 3D engine for Flash (PaperVision, Alternativa etc) which was previously very slow, will now be substantially (and more importantly, useably) faster.

yeah, Adobe seems to be embracing the GPU's on video cards now. The next photoshop CS4 uses the GPU extensively as a co processor and is significantly faster in many tasks. Supposed to have 3D paint with basic UV mapping built in too if you get the ultimage version. Still in beta at the moment.

Looks like a lot of people that hold onto older adobe software will have a good reason to upgrade soon :)

Will be nice to see flash running faster, it's usually so slow compared to hardware accelerated graphics.

Glad to hear about the use of GPU acceleration. It really bugged me how even simple Flash animations couldn't keep a consistent 30+ FPS on my rig.
(or how it bogged down the rest of my system if I was doing something else at the same time due to me still running an ancient single-core processor)

Flash 9 is hardware accelerated and jit compiled when using Action Script 3.0, so I wouldn't expect a great improvement on this area... Anyway I really like flash so I would loike very much to be wrong :D

Yeah - Shockwave is Director - and it now has dx9.0 3d but it is a real pain in the ass to work with.

Flash on the other hand - like most languages can do rudimentary 3D (like papervision) and indeed using clever maths, things like objects and letter can be made, but I haven't yet seen how Flash can import a file format which allows users a simple interface to 3d.

I'm sure it'll come, but I'm not holding my breath as there are much better ways to do 3D on the internet already - Unity and Virtools are just two which spring to mind.

IPete2.

Flash10 for sure will introduce a lot of simple 3D stuff on the web, more than any other tool managed to. Director, Unity, Virtools, ... they are nice for certain niche segments but they all don't have the huge installation base and recognition Flash has.

I think Flash10 will give a push torwards 3D in the web and Flash11 will do it a lot better then. For 3D web games you can take Unity, for serious 3D work you better take Director but for the majority Flash will be the solution.