- First up — WebGL 1.0 can’t be too far off! I say this because WebGL Working Group Chair Vladimir Vukićević (who also, remember, was originally responsible for what has become WebGL) has posted to the Public WebGL mailing list exhorting people with WebGL demos to make sure that they’re up-to-date with the latest version of the spec if they can, or at least to put text above them saying that they’re not 1.0-compliant. This is great advice, especially, as Vlad says, for those demos linked from the WebGL wiki’s User Contributions page. If you’ve got any demos up, please do double-check them!
- Related to that, another post on the same list, also from Vlad (and if you’re reading this blog regularly but you’re not a member of the list, you really should subscribe now): loops are very restricted in WebGL 1.0’s subset of GLSL — it looks to me like they’re limited to a sufficient extent that they can be unwound. ANGLE validates shaders to enforce this restriction, and now that both Minefield and Chrome use it, this restriction is enforced in two major browsers. So if you’re doing complex stuff in shaders, check they still work with the latest browsers!
- On to some demos — here’s a hypnotic morphing amoeba-like Moon by Steve Haroz (works best in Minefield, if you’re using Chrome try this version instead).
- From Mr.doob, even more amazing demos of his three.js (seriously, guys, this is getting silly!): a 3D terrain, and a (similar) Minecraft demo.
- A new blog, with a first post showing a WebGL animation morphing between different projections of a world map; worked best in Chome for me.
- From Pyro, some interesting YouTube videos: a multi-user editable 3D space based on three.js, and some views of his work-in-progress game: 1, 2.
This article on rendering large amounts of geometry in WebGL is also well worth reading.[UPDATE: article seems to have been deleted] [UPDATE: here's a version in Google's cache]
WebGL around the net, 9 December 2010
December 9th, 2010
6 Comments
i think the loop limitation comes from OpenGL ES 2.0, whereas OpenGL doesn’t have the limit.
The ANGLE driver would be enforcing the requirement from ES, and I don’t think the broken demos would have run on mobile chipsets anyway.
Having said that, it’s off the top of my head and I don’t have reference material handy to validate my ageing grey cells!
Bring on WebGL 1.0 ^w^
Thanks again for the mention.
The moon demo worked for me in a recent chromium nightly (68723). Very cool! It’s not exactly point cloud data but the demo almost suggest that it is.
I urge everyone to check out three.js — which is currently IMHO the killer, open-source application of WebGL (and Canvas2D for that matter). alteredq (http://twitter.com/#!/alteredq) (who clearly has a very strong background in 3D APIs) is working on offline AO so you can expect that to be integrated into master three.js over the coming days. mrdoob is doing a fantastic job of maintaining the project. The fact these guys are doing it all for the betterment of WebGL and “JavaScript 3D” in general is incredibly righteous. They deserve awards. Although I’m sure they’d be happy with a donation (http://flattr.com/thing/287/three-js) or shout-out on your favourite social network.
If CoffeeScript and node.js are more of your thing our studio is porting and retooling three.js to CoffeeScript/CommonJS ATM. Although we’ll be making breaking changes to the math and scene APIs it will (hopefully) maintain a feature-parity with three.js master. It will combine elements of both rendering engines and game engines. It will also feature an editor written against MochaUI (http://mochaui.org/demo/). Expect it in the coming weeks.
If you’re doing any cross-platform (CommonJS+browser) development you might want to check out requisition (https://github.com/pyrotechnick/requisition) and Walk the Line (https://github.com/pyrotechnick/walk_the_line) either of which will get you up and running in both environments in next to no time. Requisition is for projects with inter-dependencies. Walk the Line is a template for single modules.
The “This article on rendering large amounts of geometry in WebGL” link doesn’t seem to point to any useful content. Could you double-check it?
Peter — thanks for the heads-up, the author must have deleted it since I made this post.
Ahh silly us we’ve misplaced the article. Until I get a chance to rewrite it, please use this link – http://bit.ly/gdy3DK
Also our “high performance 2D/3D extensions for CommonJS’s Math module” are up at https://github.com/feisty/math
I want to encourage that you continue your great job, have a nice afternoon!