Learning WebGL

Still a little overloaded with all of the links, but I’m working on a solution — an automated WebGL link-finder that might eventually write these posts for me More on that later, here’s what I’ve seen over the last two weeks:

• A really impressive 3D FPS from Mozilla: BananaBread, originally written for the C++-based Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine.
• Another great game — if you remember Wipeout, you’ll love Thibaut Despoulain’s HexGL.
• Impressive for 13k of code: Paul Brunt’s Johnny Smiter: 13th Knight
• And one more game: PL4N3’s Wloom gets a big update.
• Beautiful: SBArt4 Daily Evolved Animation, by Tatsuo Unemi
• With all the ASCII art and Google Street View WebGL demos, it was only a matter of time before someone did this. Kudos to Peter Nitsch for doing it, though!
• An art project that uses music and graphics to visualise network data captured by Alcatel-Lucent: Electric Ikebana.
• A virtual tour of the Saint Jean Cathedral in Lyon, France.
• Sphere-tracing demos from Johannes Diemke: Oldskool Plasma Effect, Sphere Tracing with Iteration Glow, Domain Repetition and Reflections, and Variable Penumbra Soft Shadows.
• An interesting article by Mikael Emtinger on how he used his GLOW WebGL framework to build the recent LEGO-based Build With Chrome demo.
• Barack Obama’s appearance on Reddit obviously generated a lot of traffic; Darien Acosta has mashed it up into a globe visualisation.
• Here’s an in-browser (online and offline) editor for JavaScript code, with a focus on Three.js, from Mr.doob.
• More from SIGGRAPH: a video of the WebGL BoF.
• There’s lots of speculation about what the predicted iPad mini might look like so MacRumors.com decided to mock one up in WebGL.
• A new WebGL-based in-browser model viewer, SlingM.
• If you’re a user of the Sublime Text 2 editor, and you’re hand-coding GLSL shaders, then Paul Lewis has a syntax-validating plugin for you.
• Tony Parisi’s excellent WebGL, Up and Running is now officially out! It uses Three.js to help you go from zero 3D knowledge to building cool stuff in the browser really quickly and I heartily recommend it. Other options: Diego Cantor and Brandon Jones’ WebGL Beginner’s Guide, and three I’ve not read yet: Jacob Seidelin’s HTML5 Games: Creating Fun with HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL, Andreas Anyuru’s Professional WebGL Programming and James L. Williams’ Learning HTML5 Game Programming

Got a WebGL demo or link that you want me to put in next week’s roundup? Leave a comment below, or drop me a line!