- This is excellent: the Google MapsGL team have open sourced a unit testing framework they use to test their shaders. The code is here, and there’s a demo test here. They’re planning to give a talk about it at the WebGL Camp next month.
- A WebGL documentary: the National Film Board of Canada has produced One Millionth Tower, showing new possibilities for high-rise homes.
- Want to see WebGL on an iOS device? Nathan de Vries has worked out a slightly scary hack to get it running. If you don’t want to try it out yourself, Marcin Ignac has videoed the results: on an iPhone, and, in more depth, on an iPad 2.
- Cool: a GLSL sandbox from Mr. doob.
- AlteredQualia’s dynamic procedural terrain is very beautiful.
- Another one from Mr. doob: WebGL + Kinect = crazy demo.
- Brandon Jones is writing a WebGL game and blogging his progress: here’s part zero, there are links to the next part at the bottom of each post.
- Mike Cann: it’s “possible have millions of particles interacting updating and rendering simultaneously as all the operations are performed on the GPU”.
- Here are some ongoing translations of my WebGL tutorials into Spanish.
- An interesting article by Carlos Ulloa on the creation of the interactive video for Ellie Goulding’s song ‘Lights’.
- If you’re wondering how to use CORS to be able to load textures for your WebGL apps from other domains, something that’s been in Chrome for a little while and has now landed in Firefox 8, Benoit Jacob has written an explanation.
- Colin MacKenzie IV’s Jax, a WebGL framework designed to help build rich applications with Ruby on Rails on the server side, has reached version 2.0.
- Illyriad is a free-to-play, real-time, HTML5 Massively-Multiplayer strategy game. Its developers are experimenting with WebGL — sadly Chrome-only, though that’s fair enough given that it’s a first experiment. (via AlteredQualia)
- Good news — the Blackberry PlayBook 2.0 will apparently support WebGL. The latest developer release already has it, and there’s a brief demo at around 24:20 in this presentation.
- An amusing WebGL-enabled Toyota ad — pity it also insists on Chrome.
- Skulpt is an in-browser Python interpreter, apparently with WebGL bindings. I’ve only tried it on one of my less reliable machines, and the WebGL stuff didn’t work there for me, but others might have more luck — reports welcome in the comments.
- Odin is a demo from Opera’s Erik Möller. The live version works well on the latest Opera 12 beta, is rather slow on Firefox, and doesn’t work on Chrome yet. But it’s pretty impressive.
- Stephen Bannasch has updated his WebGL matrix library comparison table. Looks like Closure and TDLFast are the current leaders.
- If you’re in or near Los Angeles and want to meet fellow WebGL enthusiasts, Felix Turner and Bartek Drozdz have set up an LA WebGL meetup.
- On the subject of meetups, it sounds like last weekend’s Mozilla Media Festival in London was fun — David Humphreys has a summary here (as well as a nice post on the workings of Processing.js, the WebGL-based JavaScript implementation of the Processing graphics language).
WebGL around the net, 10 November 2011
November 10th, 2011
7 Comments
Hiya Ben from Illyriad here. Supporting all browsers that support WebGL is our priority.
We just thought we needed a quick reality check to make sure what we are doing was possible at the extremes – and it sure is! So back to the more general implementation
Fresh off the press today: http://codeflow.org/entries/2011/nov/10/webgl-gpu-landscaping-and-erosion/
Is TDLFast part of some Google project. Almost all files have Google copyright information
@Ben — excellent, that’s what I thought but it’s good to have it confirmed! There’s been a bit too much Chrome-only stuff going on recently…
@Florian — thanks! I’ll put that in next week too.
@MySchizoBuddy — yes, I think that’s right.
WRT http://operasoftware.github.com/Odin/demo.html being slow
Seemed quite faster here, on my system, but then, maybe I have nicer specs
Firefox 11 nightly
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6320 @ 1.86GHz
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G92 [GeForce 9800 GT] (rev a2)
Interesting! It might just be my Firefox being older than yours. Or maybe NVidia graphics being better than ATI…?
First off, a correction. Odin *does* work in Chromium. Just tested in Chromium 15 on my ATI machine actually, not even a dev build, and it worked smoothly. However, the browser utility menu was unusable (flickers and disappears) on that tab.
Anyway, could be ATI. I’ve always had consistently worse results under Linux on my ATI system. Even in Firefox 3.6 which had accelerated graphics using xrender, I’d get 60FPS on the HWACCEL demo on an intel card, and 10FPS on the ATI system w/ the theoretically kickass graphics card.
Additionally, getting it to run in Chromium is very hit-or-miss – demos routinely crash in Chromium nightlies that curiously work in Firefox nightlies, or if they run run much slower, , and I have to override blacklist to get them running in Chromium anyway. I’m guessing maybe the card incorrectly reporting something? Texture size?
In both browsers, after a long time, crashing is eventually consistent across the board until X is restarted. Perhaps a leak. I’m using fglrx from this spring (Ubuntu 11.04 default fglrx), maybe new versions are better.
Enabling layers acceleration in Firefox is very flaky too on the ATI card, with drawing errors or inverted textures.
None of these problems are exhibited on my NVidia or Intel machines.
So, after all that… Also tried the demo on my ATI machine under Firefox, and it also worked fine.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV730XT [Radeon HD 4670]