Unreal Tournament 3 ‘looks even better on Flash’

The Flash edition of Unreal Tournament 3 looks superior to the PS3 and 360 versions that were released four years ago, Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has said.

In early October, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney took stage at Adobe’s Max 2011 event to demonstrate Unreal Tournament 3 running through a browser in real time.

The feat was made possible with Adobe’s Flash Player 11, which utilises a hardware accelerated, programmable graphics pipeline. That means triple-A-style content can run on a web browser application that’s no bigger than a few megabytes.

The sheer astonishment of Epic running current gen games in Flash led some to believe that Sweeney’s demonstration was smoke-and-mirrors, but Rein says the achievement was real.

“I can’t blame you if you couldn’t imagine a Facebook game at the level of Unreal Tournament 3 before today,” he told Develop.

“We’re not just talking about triple-A console quality on the web, we’re actually showing it onscreen, in a web browser, playing inside Flash.

“We chose as our demo a fully playable level from Unreal Tournament 3, and it turned out to look even better than the version we shipped on Xbox 360 and PS3, with improvements like global illumination, better shadows, and god rays.”

Unreal Tournament 3, published by Midway across 2007 and 2008, was said to have suffered from technical problems during its frantic multi-platform development. However, the game recieved positive critical reception upon release.

Rein said Epic is “just getting started” with its work on Flash. It is not known if Unreal Tournament 3 will be released in full on Flash.