ANGLE support - what's the deal?

[2jfw]

Could anyone explain (or point me to an introduction) what exactly the ANGLE support means to AIR and what I can achieve or benefit from, when using it? What's the idea behind it?
Somehow, I can hardly find any details on it in combination with AIR.

[ajwfrost]

ANGLE is like an abstraction layer for graphics, where someone (Google) does the hard work of making one API work across multiple devices. Obviously that was what bodies such as Khronos were for originally, but then in practice, companies like Microsoft and Apple do their own thing and there's again no standardisation..

From a developer/user perspective, really there should be no implications. That would be our hope anyway! Currently AIR has a whole bunch of different ways of rendering and displaying the graphics, including OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Direct3D (and different versions of all those) - if we can get things working with ANGLE then we only have to support one graphics mechanism.

This then makes it easier (i.e. practical) to start making changes and enhancements - for example where we're looking at being able to share graphical contexts and have external code that can render into AIR display objects, it's much easier to do this in one set of classes rather than 8 or so...

The reason for having the 'useAngle' flag in the app descriptor is so that people can try this out and make sure that there are no side effects that they can see (which of course has not been the case to date). At some point when we think it's getting more mature, we can flip that so that it becomes 'on by default', and then ultimately we would like to end up taking out the other capabilities and just have all the graphics in AIR working via ANGLE.

Hope that helps explain the plan?

thanks

[2jfw]

Very interesting - many thanks for the details on this!
Especially the part "to share graphical contexts and have external code that can render into AIR display objects" sounds great.
Speaking on behalf of the company I work for, we would actually have a use-case to get video (GPU texture) into one of our apps - is this something which would be covered?
Like:

App A
creates texture
→ shares handle

App B (actual AIR App)
opens handle
→ renders same GPU texture

Is there also a general performance gain to be expected?