Finally this year the Holy Grail will be attained if we are to believe Adobe: fully accelerated 3D in Flash! This prospect promises to revolutionize browser based gaming. Of course others have made excellent accelerated 3D browser plugins already (Shockwave, Unity) but simply failed because they didn’t have and in no way could gain the penetration rate of the Flash plugin.

I’m very happy with this development and I’m very curious about 2 things: how will the tools look like and how extendible will it be.
Having worked already with many many 3D engines I have concluded that the power of a 3D engine does not lay in its features but far more in its tools. The internet is littered with 3D engines made by companies or hobbyists with promising features but many lack tools to get content into a form that is usable for their engine.
Lacking of this kind of tools means you have to program these tools yourself which is most likely to be a lot more work than ‘just’ programming your game.
For making games, or any 3D application for that matter, 2 tools are vital besides the basic 3D editor such as 3D Studio Max or Maya:
One is the model preparation tool, this allows you to prepare a 3D model that came from the 3D editor for the engine, apply engine specific details that cannot be set in the basic 3D editor (dynamic textures, shaders etc.).

If you just see a blank space above, click here for Youku Version for Mainland China

The other one is the scene editor, this allows for placing game objects in the world and details that is specific to your game/application.
In this sense Adobe is facing one hell of a task, how will they integrate all of this in the already burdened Flash IDE? Or will they release a completely separate set of tools for using 3D in Flash? Or will they simply not supply them and let the community create those tools on top of their API?

The second thing is a bit of a worry to me, 3D technology is a fast evolving technology and I wonder how Adobe intends to keep up with that. Now they could expose direct access to the OpenGL and Direct3D subsystems to allow users themselves to extend the Flash 3D engine.
Of course in a monetizing sense this would not be desirable as it will kill an option to trick users into buying new Flash versions. This makes me fear the implementation will lack functionality to create cool features that simply cannot be done even though the necessary functions are very common in 3D engines (Shockwave 8.5 additive blending anyone?).

Either way, I’m sure they will come up with something useful although maybe not cutting edge we at TribePlay are going to have fun with it!

P.S. Check also this post out, Uza is providing a helpful roundup on Molehill news, with lots of demos, videos and background infos.