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by beebeepka 1724 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
1 comments
pjmlp 1724 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 1724 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 1724 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 1724 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 1724 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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dahart 1724 days ago
Safari, made by Apple, was the lone holdout for WebGL2. You’re familiar with Apple’s relationship to Flash. No I won’t be surprised at all if Safari holds out on WebGPU, and it will be precisely because it offers functionality that Metal already has.

> Enjoy your pyrrhic victory.

I don’t understand why you’re repeatedly spending time on WebGL threads sharing sour grapes about Flash. They don’t compete. At all. WebGL is not an authoring tool, and Flash was. Your sentiment is just laughably misplaced. Adobe killed flash, Adobe alone is where your ire should be aimed, for not making an ecosystem that could withstand abusive content creators.

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