So, if you've been seriously missing Flash and Actionscript 3 for all your interactive endeavors over the past decade, look no further than our most recent release of the 2Advanced V3 Website, completely rearchitected, reimagined, and redesigned in Rive and React JS (Vite).
For our own edification, we tackled this project entirely in the latest version of Rive, aiming to map our former functionality, interaction, and all of the animations of the iconic 2001 V3 Website down to the keyframe. Of course, when we set out to build the original V3 Website, we already had a solid 3-years of Flash experience under our belt, so imagine our surprise that our very FIRST project ever in Rive was a total success for just two guys, two months and a whole bunch of determination.
Overall, as interactives that have spent the past 25 years in applications like Adobe Flash, Animate, and After Effects, all of the underlying concepts came quite easily for us. However, truth be told, there are also several concepts (such as the Rive state machine) and a few missing features (such as gradient clipping masks, blurs, glows, and a few other gotchas) that forced us to deal with some creative and technical solutions to a few roadblocks. Moreover, it was a bit unsettling to find that up to now, nobody had tackled as ambitious of a project as the V3 Website.
While there isn't presently a built-in scripting language as formidable as Actionscript 3, we did find solace in implementing the Rive APIs in concert with React.js to backfill our needs for dynamic content and functionality. Unfortunately, the documentation and examples didn't go nearly as deep as we would have liked, but of course, that isn't going to stop 2A! In fact, it was pretty exciting to know that with each new solution we architected, we were pioneering entirely new ground in the Rive.app. While this may have been a bit unnerving and even downright frustrating at times, we were fortunate that the team at Rive was right there with us, providing superhuman support and offering ideas to accomplish much of what we did.
We set this bar far higher than the original V3 Website, mainly because today, there's just a greater demand for functionality. As you venture through the site, it helps to know that we have a formidable implementation of Google Analytics and Tag Manager under the hood. In addition, the React.js code enabling our mailing list subscriptions and contact forms was no small feat, given that Rive didn't have a notion of standard UI controls. When it came to mixed media, structured HTML, TailwindCSS, video content, and literally four complete sections of dynamic content, we were amazed at how easy it was to accomplish what we needed with a bit of code, some elbow grease, and JSON.
Overall, we plan to spend the next few months dissecting the V3 project here on the blog. For our Patreon members, we plan to release a great deal of our source code, tools, and other value adds for Rive that will simplify similar caliber projects while showing off Rive's potential. In the meantime, feel free to hit any of us up on the 2Advanced Discord server over the upcoming days, as we're always happy to tackle questions in real-time.