Adobe AIR towards WebGL

[Sjamientje]

Dear Adobe family

I know that a lot of loyal developers would be helped A LOT when AIR could be exported to WebGL. Even in a premium construction... I've seen a request for this feature on Bugbase but there was no reply from you guys. Does this mean that you're not interested in this? Or you just didn't see the request?

Please answer the community...

Thanks

Chamin

[Colin Holgate]

AIR is where you take ActionScript 3 and publish it to non-browser platforms. For example, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows desktop apps. To get WebGL you wouldn't need to involve AIR at all.

Converting an ActionScript 3 project to Javascript to do WebGL would be tough, so a better way would be to develop in Javascript in the first place.

Adobe Animate can do custom FLA types, and one of the standard ones is for WebGL. With that you could create some sort of Javascript based 2D application, and it would play back in browsers that can do WebGL. That includes iOS 8 or later, and I guess recent Android too.

Now, I suspect you want full 3D WebGL, and tools like Unity have done that, but Unity uses emscripten, which has quite a large memory overhead. Adobe could use that too, but Adobe's only tool that does interactive 3D is Director, and that hasn't been improved much for a few years now. There is no Adobe AIR or ActionScript 3D environment, they rely on third parties to do those things. There is an AwayJS custom FLA type for Adobe Animate, so that has possibilities.

Here's a presentation about how the AwayJS guy sees the future, maybe AwayJS would be a good enough alternative to pure WebGL?

The Future of WebGL with Adobe Animate & AwayJS | SkillsCast | 9th February 2016

[Sjamientje]

Its not that I want full 3D environments. But we're developing a lot of our software in air with Starling. Those games are perfectly suitable for a web experience without Flash. But the existing tools which are based on JS just don't do the job properly in my opinion. Away3D was planning on a JS implementation for starling but thats on hold i think... so still webgl would be great.

[Colin Holgate]

If you don't need 3D, then have you tried the WebGL 2D FLA type? What is the main advantage you see in using WebGL instead of Canvas? Canvas will work on more systems.

[rewb0rn]

Hey Colin I think we had the discussion before and you did express you concerns in the other thread. The problem for us is we are sitting on a huge codebase and we are still continuing to expand it. Rewriting everything in JS/HTML would be a major effort and would still leave us with a second codebase (we publish to mobile, too). Air to HTML would really come to the rescue.

[rewb0rn]

FlashDaily just posted this, have you seen it? Flash Daily: “Flash return” - using Adobe Flash CS / Flash CC /...

I made a quick test to convert a test swf to HTML with the online production tab. This uses TweenMax to tween the red rectangle. It looks promising and will definitely require a closer look: http://www.flashreturn.com/default/preview/0/NewProject.swf/339a5de4-b7f3-4ff1-9991-dc1d01a8d432/201...

[Colin Holgate]

Thanks, that looks interesting. I've said it would be hard to convert AS3 to Javascript, but I guess that someone dedicated to the task might get there quicker than Adobe. Adobe have to keep on working on all the other aspects of Animate.