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Re:WebGL2 Fundamentals by samwillis on Sunday February 26, 2023 @07:16AM (#34944945)
The key to the success of Flash was the compilation of the player with a really good and accessible creation tool. That's what's missing from WebGL development, a flash style tool that scales from basic animation and interaction design up to full game development.

I was maybe 13 when I first used Flash (v3 in about 1999), way before I had much experience with "proper" coding. The fact that I could use it, the same tool professionals were using was what made it so special.

I'm sure it's coming.

Re:WebGL2 Fundamentals by TazeTSchnitzel on Sunday February 26, 2023 @01:11PM (#34947739)
That tool could and should have been Flash, but Adobe don't seem to be interested in making ActionScript work on the modern web, which is weird.
Re:WebGL2 Fundamentals by shove on Sunday February 26, 2023 @05:13PM (#34950129)
That’s not entirely true. They were dragging their feet, but there were efforts both within and outside Adobe.
Re:WebGL2 Fundamentals by dakom on Sunday February 26, 2023 @05:21PM (#34950200)
The carefree fun of youth is kinda the difference though :)

I also built a lot of stuff in Flash/AS back in the day, and even rode the wave into AIR for a while.

The OOP system, event handling with spaghetti code, and high level graphics abstractions just never bothered me. Things worked, and the nature of the beast is I didn't have to worry about maintainability so much.

Nowadays it would be different. I don't think Flash or Actionscript would be quite as fun. For out of the box engines, Unity->WebGL is far more powerful imho.

PIXI.js and any compatible spritesheet animation package gets you more than halfway there, using the same OOP scene graph paradigm, for people who really miss the Flash approach. Not the same level of IDE integration, but, still..

At least least I looked at it, which was years ago, and successfully ported over some old flash apps.