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by pjmlp 1727 days ago
Given the progress of WebGL adoption and development tools, still pretty much up to date, for the most part.

Safari 15 just added WebGL 2.0 available on stable, and native debugging tools are still the way to go for most cases.

After 10 years.
1 comments
beebeepka 1727 days ago
Yep, not much had changed over the last few years on that regard. Well, except running complex 3d scenes in a modern browser is mostly fine these days. Plenty of performance

I still remember Macromedia/Adobe showing off their flash 3d engine. Nothing was accelerated, just software rendering. Ugly and slow but there wasn't anything better at the time. It went nowhere I think

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pjmlp 1727 days ago
Of course it went nowhere, we have spent 10 years catching up with 2011, after killing Flash.

See Unreal Engine 3 demo on Flash.

And with Web 3D reflecting 2012 hardware in 2021, no wonder that the answer for ultimate 3D and good debugging tools is native on mobile, or server side rendering with streaming.

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dahart 1727 days ago
> we have spent 10 years catching up with 2011, after killing Flash.

Lol, Flash 3d was built on OpenGL and DirectX, which are still here and have progressed since then. What are we catching up with? Adobe chose to kill flash because of WebGL.

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pjmlp 1727 days ago
Lol, it wasn't Adobe that killed plugins, rather an intifada against browser plugins, that is yet to match Adobe's tooling.
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dahart 1727 days ago
Hahaha Flash abuse by advertisers and spammers is a big reason plugins met their well-deserved end. I really am sorry that you lost your favorite tools, Flash was truly awesome for animators and developers. What you’re talking about is separate and independent from GL APIs, which don’t attempt to compete in the artist-facing tooling space at all.
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pjmlp 1727 days ago
The irony is that native game development and server side rendering is where all the 3D programming fun is nowadays.

Even when WebGPU eventually comes out into stable Chrome, it will take again 10 years to similar adoption, and it won't be anything more than a plain 1.0 MVP, short of many things that Vulkan, Metal and DirectX 12 Ultimate are capable of in 2021.

Enjoy your pyrrhic victory.

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