With Unreal Engine 3 support, Flash 11 may bring console-quality games to Facebook, beyond

By Mike Dunn Published October 4, 2011

Tired of playing simple 2D Facebook games? Epic Games and Adobe sure hopes you are, with the announcement of support for the Unreal Engine 3 in Adobe Flash 11. Adobe Flash just recently updated to version 11, and with the update came an extreme boost in performance. Unreal Engine support could mean some very serious games coming to Facebook, Google+ or maybe even Android.

With its new hardware-accelerated Stage 3D APIs, Flash Player 11 allows 1,000 times faster 2D and 3D graphics rendering performance over Flash Player 10. That is a pretty significant jump in performance, and so much so that Sweeney thinks “With UE3 and Flash, games built for high-end consoles can now run on the Web or as Facebook apps, reaching an enormous user base.”

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For anyone who is a lover of video games this is great news, as it will give even more chances to play the games we love. Here is a short list of games that have been made using Unreal Engine 3: Gears of War 3, DC Universe Online, the Mass Effect series, the BioShock series, and Borderlands. Playing a game like Gears of War 3 on Facebook seems much more appealing than playing Cityville.

The real question, though: Now that it’s possible to make amazing games playable in Flash, will developers actually make them? With Flash still officially shunned on iOS, and not supported on Windows Phone 7’s browser, there is fear that Flash 11 may not have a future. We certainly hope that this new technology will help bring console quality games to Facebook, or maybe even our Android devices, but only time will tell if developers bite.

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Mike graduated from University of Arizona with a degree in poetry, and made his big break by writing love sonnets to the…

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