GDC: Epic aiming to get "Samaritan" into Flash

During a presentation of the Unreal Engine at GDC attended by GamesIndustry International, Epic Games announced that they've made progress running the Unreal Engine in Adobe Flash. In particular they showed off Dungeon Defenders running full screen as well as it does on PS3 in an impressive demonstration.

Epic Games VP Mark Rein said after the Unreal Engine in Flash demonstration, "This isn't your father's FarmVille."

Another demonstration took the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament III running in Flash to show how console quality experiences were possible in Flash. Rein said that the long term goal is to get something like the impressive "Samaritan" demo working in Flash.

Speaking of the "Samaritan" demo, Rein noted that when they showed it off last year, it took three Nvidia cards and a massive power supply to run. However, now they were able to show it again running on a new, not yet released Nvidia card and one 200 watt power supply. Being able to do full optimizations for something like "Samaritan" on one video card is a big step forward.

Rein said that graphics technology has advanced even faster than Epic thought it would. He, not surprisingly, said that Unreal Engine 4 is "blowing people's socks off" and that there was no going back after seeing that level of graphics. Unreal Engine 4 was not show off to the press, however.