A acquaintance of mine had a conversation with an Adobe executive discussing about jumping ship to Unity3D for their upcoming Virtual Worlds. The executive reportedly said that Unity is going to die away in a short while, hinting at 3D functionality (you know, _real_ 3D functionality, meshed, GPU-rendered) in the next version of Flash. There’s also a session at Max this year titled “Flash Player 3D Future” presented by a Flash Player engineer where he’ll demo new API’s in an upcoming Flash Player release.

So, everything points to Flash Player 11 finally having a real 3D rendering engine and joining the fight for online 3D supremacy against WebGL and Unity3D.

While I think that it’s almost one of those CE-Oh no, he didn’t! no he didn’t moments to say that Unity3D is going away because of the Flash Player, it’s a really welcome addition (if done right) to the Flash Player and has been long due.

Unity kicks ass, and especially Unity 3 with it’s deferred rendering, MOD support (wOOt, have been asking that from the Flash Player teams since version 5), audio effects, beast light-mapping, super-fast scripting, umbra occlusion culling, physics and great editor is something that the Flash Player and IDE will never be able to match for serious 3D game development.

On the other hand you obviously have the great penetration (and big community) of the Flash Player which will drive casual game development away from Unity.