Show HN: War and Peace and WebGL | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: War and Peace and WebGL

wdobbie.com

65 pointswjd28 comments

This discussion reminds me times 4 years ago, when I showed my WebGL games to my firends and instead of getting an interesting feedback, 90% of comments were about my games not working on their devices. Sad to see the same thing in 2016 :(

New technology is always full of naysayers and people pointing out the obvious defects. Real innovation comes from recognizing and realizing the potential of it.

Oddly, my machines really did creak with WebGL, but it appears as if they have been improving in performance. It's probably not graphic drivers as this ubuntu laptop hasn't had a new graphics driver since 2013. It must be the browsers improving performance. Anyone else noticed WebGL working better these days on the same hardware?

I work on the renderer for a product that uses WebGL (I won't link to it because I don't want to sound like a shill, but it's a web based 3d modeler called FormIt).

Unfortunately, I think webgl performance has actually been getting much worse on Chrome. (Firefox has been fine).

WebGL is pretty exciting in what it makes possible, but it's based on the OpenGL ES2 spec from 2007 which is way out of date at this point, so the surface area of the hardware you can actually use is really limited, and various aspects of javascript lead to some really ugly performance compromises. This is partially why I'm pretty excited about web assembly -- I don't think it'll fix everything off the bat, but not having to go through javascript could be a really big win.

I'm curious about the choice of bmp for http://wdobbie.com/warandpeace/glyphs.bmp

Why not a png ?

Edit: So after a quick test:

* glyphs.bmp 53.5 MB

* glyphs.png 7.6 MB

I guess it could be shrinked even more.

The .bmp file is served gzipped to 7 MB.

LZMA and Bzip2 both get it down to about 3 MB but I'd need to use a javascript decompressor.

Makes sense. My bad, I tested with wget and compression was disabled.

It works well for me in several platforms.

What would improve it is when you zoom, with the mouse wheel or gesture if it would zoom in on the mouse cursor point rather than at the centre of the screen.

Works fine, and is rather impressive, on Windows 10 - both in FF and Chrome.

Doesn't work on iPad - just get blank pages.

Doesn't work on Windows 10 for me, neither FF nor Chrome.

Strange - works for me on an iPad Pro with latest iOS.

Worked for me on iPad mini 2, albeit very slowly.

Windows 10 chrome. doesn't work. chrome canary didn't work (some d3d errors) edge (i gave up after waiting for 2 minutes to load)

Not really sure this is an unsolved problem in other contexts. For example, any good image viewer would have no-shimmering at all scales.

You simply render your text as images and then apply the method already used by the image viewers.

I'm getting some weird artifacts: http://i.imgur.com/U3sSkW3.png

Ubuntu Gnome, AMD open source driver

interesting technique but it's extremely slow on Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB (and so I assume other machines). Like when zoomed in it's under 2fps whereas I suspect the built in chrome text renderer can do that much faster (generating texture glyphs of the needed characters at the desired res and then rendering them). I'm curious why drawing less characters (like 5 giant characters) runs at 2fps. Is the shader that heavy?

I see all white pages with no text on them. "Show grid" shows yellow and green rectangles. Linux, Firefox 43, Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Same here, all white on chrome, linux, nvidia proprietary. The previous text rendering demo worked on the same setup.

Me too. The previous version of the demo used to work.

Chrome 47.0.2526.73 (64 Bit) Linux

Works flawlessly here, Linux, Fedora 23, Firefox 42, Radeon HD 7770, open source driver

Loaded up linux and I got the same issue. Working on it!

Should be fixed now!

Works great with FF43 and Nvidia proprietary drivers now.

That fixed it for me, that was quick.

Yes, works like a charm now. Really nicely rendered. Good job!

What was the issue?

Same here, Ubuntu + built in Intel display.

I really like this demo, but it reliably crashes a mid 2012 macbook pro with lion, both on firefox and safari (the older version of the demo was the same).

Now, reading the other comments, i wonder if there are any tools that help with diagnosing device capabilities? I don't have high hopes of integrating anything WebGL related in my projects due to these problems, so how can you make sure that WebGL code will work across devices?

Edit: How can you make sure you notice when it's not working?

It's almost completely unreadable on my Android phone. The character shapes are mostly there, but the triangles overlap in weird ways, like vertex order might be wrong it something.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvutftylbj77d8r/Screenshot_2016-01...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3qn9h5pgw2p671/Screenshot_2016-01...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4h93ycueykrjai/Screenshot_2016-01...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com