molehill is slow ;)

[peel peel]

i just tested a quake 3 map démo in flash molehill

http://aerys.in/minko-quake-3

performance are awful, sometimes it gets 100% of my 3ghz cpu

i have very very faster results when i display q3 maps in director



i tested this one:

http://molehill.zombietycoon.com/

when i move the camera, it takes 100% CPU for a poor 25 fps framerate



and i thsted this shit

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/molehill-terrain-demo/

50% of my 3ghz cpu, for a poor 25 fps framerate, a poor untextured terrain chunk... my terrain engine with director is really faster




sorry molehill won't be a revolution...


you can keep on working with unity and director

:)

[Mal]

Another demo to test, created with CopperCube...

http://www.ambiera.com/coppercube/demo.php?demo=backyard&molehill=1

[Noisecrime]

Quoting peel peel <peel....@gmail.com>:

> i just tested a quake 3 map démo in flash molehill
>
> http://aerys.in/minko-quake-3
>
> performance are awful, sometimes it gets 100% of my 3ghz cpu
>
> i have very very faster results when i display q3 maps in director
>

> sorry molehill won't be a revolution...
>
>
> you can keep on working with unity and director
>
> :)

Sorry just tested all of these and apart from browser rendering issues
on the Mac, all ran at perfectly acceptable performance, both in
framerate and cpu usage. I also noticed that the Flash player was a
debug build, so presumably there is even more scope for improved
performance.

Perhaps its falling back to software for you as it shouldn't really be
cpu intensive, not unless Adobe have just implemented in immediate
mode for 3D or the games are pushing large amounts of
calls/instructions to the gpu.

Besides even if it did use 100% cpu, do you really think anyone is
going to care, at least for desktop/laptops? I could see it being a
problem on mobile platforms as it would drain your battery. However as
i said didn't notice any adverse cpu usage on my machine.

Clearly Molehill is not as capable as say Unity, it may not even be as
efficient as pushing polygons as SW3D, but its close enough and the
install base is simply going to kill of Shockwave 3D.

[peel peel]

i just see that molehill demos are significantly slower than what unity & shockwave can do.
i have a recent computer (dual core, shader pixel3 gpu) and max racer is unplayable for me, too slow

i'm under windows, it's not rendered in software 3d, it's "nearfiltered" hardware 3d with vsync

a low-level 3d engine CAN NOT be fast. same problem with java3d... a fast script-managed 3d engine MUST be high-level, triangles have to be natively managed




you all say "director is dead" but i don't believe you. i recently learnt that director is now supported by applestore

6 years ago i already heared "director is dead", today i still see than most of 3d RIA games are made with director ( and i can see too that unity webplayer games are pure shit )... so... i don't trust about-the-future speculations, i trust what's made now

[Noisecrime]

Quoting peel peel <peel....@gmail.com>:

> i just see that molehill demos are significantly slower than what unity &
> shockwave can do.
> i have a recent computer (dual core, shader pixel3 gpu) and max racer is
> unplayable for me, too slow

Slower than Unity and even SW3D, yes (currently), but as I said all
those demos where perfectly playable for me, so it becomes irrelevant.

Don't get me wrong, from what i've now seen I don't think Molehill is
a great 3D engine, in fact i'm not sure how much of an 'engine' it
actually is. Its performance is not as fast as it should be, scenes
seem to still be capable of less polygons than the decade old SW3D,
though it does support advanced shaders. Its not that Molehill is
state of the art thats going to kill Shockwave 3D, its the fact that
its Flash or rather in the Flash plugin.

Seriously, present a user with the option to go to a webpage and
immediately start playing a 3D game or go through the experience of
downloading and installing a plugin (SW3D and Unity) and you know
which version they are going to go for, regardless of the resources it
requires to run.

If I were still doing online games ( I had to stop after almost losing
a client LEGO, due to the SW3D/audio crash bug that wasn't fixed for
2-3 years!) I know my clients would be climbing all over Molehill.

> you all say "director is dead" but i don't believe you. i recently learnt

> that director is now supported by applestore.

So what?
They could support mTropolis too, but wouldn't mean that it wasn't dead ;)

> 6 years ago i already heared "director is dead", today i still see than most
> of 3d RIA games are made with director ( and i can see too that unity
> webplayer games are pure shit )... so... i don't trust about-the-future
> speculations, i trust what's made now

Director is dead posts have been around for decades, but you'd have to
be in denial if you don't think its dying though. Look at the
reduction in the number of developers, number of mailing lists, number
of support websites, etc. Most developers have moved on, we gave them
(Adobe/MM) 10 years to do something and nothing happened!

Obviously this doesn't mean you will have to stop developing with
Director/Shockwave, but it will limit potential client work and you'll
increasingly become part of a very small pond.

Noisecrime 2011

[peel peel]

you say during 10 years macromediadobe hasn't done anything in director...

that's wrong.

okay thet didn't add lots of new features but they're still working to adapt dir/shockwave to new machines

that's enough for me.




i've repeated it many times, if in 6 months i see that most of RIA 3d games are made with unity or molehill, i will work with unity or molehill. for the moment they're still made with director...

[peel peel]

i remember, 7 years ago everybody was saying that Virtools will kill Shockwave player... today, virtools plugin is dead and shockwave plugin is still alive

from 6 years i hear that unity webplayer will kill shockwave plugin... but nowadays most of RIA 3d games are made with shockwave plugin, and unity plugin games are shit

now i hear molehill wil kill shockwave plugin... so i'm laughing

i don't trust speculations about the future of ria technologies... i trust what i see on the web at now


maybe i'm a bit too pragmatic ?..

[Bart Libert (EducaSoft)]

Peel,

 

From day 1 of Unity being mentioned here you have been firing all kinds of nonsense to unity. Its slow, it crashes, ...

 

Now you do just the same at molehill.

 

 

Its quite clear, you are 1000% director fanboy and thats great for you. A lot of people do however have another opinion and we also have the right to have that opinion, just as much as you have the right to like director (which I also like but don't use anymore now. It had its time for me)

2011/2/28 peel peel <peel....@gmail.com>

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[peel peel]

Bart > HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAH

i'm not director fanboy at all... i've complained about a lot of very bad points in director

to be honest i don't like director

i don't choose a RIA tech because i like it, i choose a ria tech because it's a standard

i work with director because it's the standard of RIA 3d. not because i like it. when the standard will be something else, i'll work with something else

[Bart Libert (EducaSoft)]

This ends my part of the discussion.

2011/2/28 peel peel <peel....@gmail.com>

--

[Gaz Bushell]

I currently have two squidsoup installations running that require director in some shape or form but just as noisecrime said for " legacy support" its tech that I had made a while back. but in time they will be upgraded.

But on the web I would never make anything new in  or with shockwave. 

It's an awful prehistoric tool by today's standards. Nostalgic. 

Molehill does look interesting, and unity to export to it? Surely that's the future ?

Sent from my iPhone

--

[CC Chamberlin]

On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:08 PM, peel peel wrote:

> a low-level 3d engine CAN NOT be fast.

Speed issues don't stop people from making games in Flash.

Here's the thing about game engines - they only have to be fast enough to do what you want to do with them, and a good developer can reduce the speed requirements with clever and thoughtful design and implementation and still come out the other end with a fun game.

> same problem with java3d... a fast script-managed 3d engine MUST be high-level, triangles have to be natively managed

Tell that to Mojang.

> you all say "director is dead" but i don't believe you. i recently learnt that director is now supported by applestore

What exactly do you mean by "supported by applestore?"

Clearly, you don't mean the App Store, since there's no export path to iOS.

If you mean that you can sell Director-based apps on the Mac App Store, well, there's nothing at all special about that. *Any* binary executable (that doesn't run afoul of Apples' other guidelines, like private API usage, porn, etc.) can be sold through the Mac App Store; all you need to do is codesign it properly.

As far as I can tell, there's no explicit support for Director apps coming out of Apple that isn't given to any other type of binary executable. If I'm wrong, provide a link - I'd be interested in seeing it, since I have a few Director apps I could push out to the Mac App Store.

> 6 years ago i already heared "director is dead", today i still see than most of 3d RIA games are made with director ( and i can see too that unity webplayer games are pure shit )... so... i don't trust about-the-future speculations, i trust what's made now

Wow, that's not my experience at all. Got some links to these awesome new "3d RIA games" made with Director you're talking about? There are some legacy games like MaidMarian and Habbo Hotel still around, but I can't think of a single new offering that's generated any buzz.

On the other hand, I've seen some beautiful Unity stuff come through the grapevine (Blush, RavenSword, Colorblind, Paper Moon, The Graveyard, etc.). In fact, I'm seeing positive reviews of Unity games *that don't mention they are Unity games*, and I only discover this fact after checking them out, RavenSword being the prime example. For instance, here's just a smattering of reviews from these games:

<http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/03/blush.php>
<http://playthisthing.com/blush>
<http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/03/the-graveyards/>
<http://toucharcade.com/2009/11/17/ravensword-the-fallen-king-the-review/>
<http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/05/paper_moon.php>
<http://simonferrari.com/2010/02/19/colorbind-the-ideal-of-direct-manipulation/>

Every one of those is a pretty glowing review of the Unity game in question, from non-Unity blogs. If you think all the Unity stuff is "pure shit", I think you're looking in the wrong places. Moreover, I don't think Shockwave3D could even be used to build some of the aforementioned games. If you can find me a Director game that is generating so much buzz that it shows up on Wired, like "The Graveyard", or which is selling like hotcakes for $7 a pop on the App Store, like "RavenSword", where most apps are $1... oh, wait, Director won't publish to the App Store. Never mind.

CC

[peel peel]

yeah, yeah guys, i've understood your message, director is shit (we should rename this group "anti-director list" ...)

i agree.

you haven't learnt me anything, i've always thougt director is shit

unfortunately i claim that unity plugin is shit too, java3d is shit, and molehill is supershit

we have no choice, all ria 3d technos are shit

so whatever you choose... it's shit ^^


so... well... i prefer working with the standard shit...

[Gene Endrody]

"low-level 3d engine CAN NOT be fast."

I don't agree and it doesn't make sense. Here's the basic idea in Adobe's
words.

"The Molehill APIs do not use what is called a fixed function pipeline but a
programmable pipeline only, which means that you will have to work with
vertex and fragment shaders to display anything on screen. For this, you
will be able to upload on the graphics card your shaders as pure low-level
AGAL ("Adobe Graphics Assembly Language") bytecode as a ByteArray. As a
developer you have two ways to do this, write your shaders at the assembly
level, which requires an advanced understanding of how shaders works or use
a higher-level language like Pixel Bender 3D which will expose a more
natural way to program your shaders and compile for you the appropriate AGAL
bytecode."

At Molehill's level, you are really programming in assembly in a fashion
that can be easily transfered to the GPU with a bare minimum of overhead.
The engine (Unity, Alternativa, Flare3D) goes on top of that to simplify the
process because you don't want to be making your game entirely in AGAL
assembly. Molehill just provide a way for Flash to talk to the GPU with the
absolue minimum of overhead. Eveything else (shader definitons, art
pipelines, ect.) is the responsibility of the engine and it is very, very
fast from what I've seen.

Gene

Tell that to Mojang.

CC

--

[peel peel]

i'm not talking about shaders and gpu

i'm talking about triangles and cpu, that's why molehill is slow

2011/2/28 Gene Endrody <ge...@mmorpg.ca>

[Allen Partridge]

Hello everyone,

Basically with Molehill you get access to hardware accelerated 3D if the machine has a Graphics processor, and you get access to a ton of systems which already have Flash, but no 3D engine or visualization tool. You'll be able to extend the API with ActionScript (either your own, or libraries / engines from third parties.) With Shockwave you get a higher level interface with modest visualization and out of the box engine / game dev elements (eg. collision, lighting, models etc). Each tool, Shockwave and Molehill, is right for certain jobs.

I'm glad to see the Flash Molehill API joining the online 3D arena (because it will enable more 3D content online) and I hope to see both Molehill and Adobe Shockwave empower creative professionals long into the future.

Most 3D developers will tell you that the easier it is to make 3D content, the less optimized that content is likely to be. So I don't think we'll see any universal solution that gives; Easy 3D authoring, super-speed performance and maximized ubiquity all that soon, but this step is bound to get us a closer (because Molehill gives us ubiquity and super-speed --at least at the lowest level) and I think that's worth celebrating.

I'll be at GDC with Krishnan and members of the Shockwave Development team this week. We'll be meeting with 3D game developers and several of the major portals. We're going to be showing some new games from X-Form, showing some of the newest features in Shockwave, and celebrating Shockwave's 500 million + plugin installations. You can always get the latest updates on what's happening with Shockwave (and Director) by joining the Shockwave pre-release. If you're a creative professional using Shockwave & Director, just drop Krishnan a note, and he'll likely add you to the list. If you plan to be at GDC and you are a Shockwave Game developer, drop me a note (if we haven't already corresponded -- allenp [at] adobe [dot] com) so I can fill you in on special activities.

--Allen

[CC Chamberlin]

On Feb 28, 2011, at 5:07 PM, Allen Partridge wrote:

> Basically with Molehill you get access to hardware accelerated 3D if the machine has a Graphics processor, and you get access to a ton of systems which already have Flash, but no 3D engine or visualization tool. You'll be able to extend the API with ActionScript (either your own, or libraries / engines from third parties.) With Shockwave you get a higher level interface with modest visualization and out of the box engine / game dev elements (eg. collision, lighting, models etc). Each tool, Shockwave and Molehill, is right for certain jobs.

Will there be a Molehill Xtra (or a Flash Xtra that supports Molehill) for Director?

And will Molehill be able to export to iOS?

CC