Pixel Bender and Shaders

Abstract

There’s an old saying that goes. “Give a man a fish, you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.” That’s all very good if you like fish, or fishing analogies in general (and hey, who doesn’t?), but what has that to do with Flash, you may well ask? Well, ActionScript comes with a lot of great tools that have been provided for us by the programmers behind the player and the language, but even they conceded they couldn’t fulfill all the graphical needs for all the developers going forward. Even if that was feasible, given the rampant creativity that exists in the constantly evolving Flash community, having dozens of filters and blend modes to cover all possible graphical situations would greatly increase the size of the Flash Player. So instead of giving us the fish, they have handed us a rod. Welcome to Pixel Bender.