Unity announces Flash support

Middleware-maker Unity is to add Flash support to its engine, offering the option to export games to Adobe's platform.

Confirmed the company on its blog, "In the past few months, our engineers have been investigating the possibility of adding a Flash Player exporting option to Unity. That investigation has gone very well, and we're moving into full production."

While full details and launch dates were not yet given, Unity sought to play down fears that its own Web Player might suffer as a result of the integration. "It will be up to developers in the end, to decide whether they want to target only the Flash Player, only the Unity Web Player, or some combination of the two."

The news came in the same week that Adobe made its 'Molehill' version of Flash available, which includes full 3D gaming support for the first time.

However, Unity felt Molehill should not be considered analogous to its own engine. "Molehill exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools."