[Idea] Expose OpenGL ES 2/3.X to AIR Applications

[Fancy2209]

AIR 51.2's Beta added support for using ANGLE on Windows for GLES, as ANGLE also works on every other platform AIR supports (and Linux and Android also have native GLES), I believe AIR could also support rendering using GLES on all of those platforms.

Having that in mind, I believe this addition is a perfect oppurtunity to add an additional kind of Context to Stage3D.

My proposal is a ContextGLES class, that could expose the GLES2/GLES3.X API Directly from AS3. This would be aquired with a requestContextGLES function in Stage3D, that instead of taking a render mode or profile, would take what revision of GL is desired (so a choice between ES 2, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2) and return a context that exposes the GL API corresponding to the version asked.

Stage3D is nice but I believe OpenGL would be good for more advanced usage, the ability to use GLSL much more easily than through an AGAL converter, and the ability to use more features not available in Context3D like Compute Shaders.

[ajwfrost]

If you're looking to actually use the OpenGL ES API directly, then this is something we'd expose via an ANE mechanism. We hadn't really considered adding ActionScript bindings for it but I guess it could be a bit easier to then use cross-platform!

There are some dangers to exposing this to ActionScript though, given that AIR will also be doing rendering using it.. so careful caching and resetting of state information may be needed. But it could end up looking a lot like WebGL I guess :-)

Thanks for the idea!

[Fancy2209]

Yeah this idea is mainly inspired by the WebGLRenderingContext classes from the Web. I just feel access to GLES in AS3 could open many possibilities to AIR.

[Molisson]

Having learned OpenGL ES 3.0 for a while, this could work for me as the benefits are huge:

1. You don't have to translate GLSL code into AGAL (although there are some libraries that do help us with that but maybe most of them are not up to date(?) )
2. Assuming it would look a lot like WebGL (see the above comment), it would be helpful to port over code to another language like JavaScript, equivalents exist like for example; Stage is sorta like HTMLCanvasElement and CanvasRenderingContext2D, with this proposal in Stage3D class it would be WebGLRenderingContext or WebGL2RenderingContext depending on which version we're talking about

I hope one day we will see this proposal in the future! 😄

[itlancer]

Related feature request: #3770