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Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it would be possible to reduce the version requirements to OpenGL 4.3 / OpenGL ES 3.0? Then it might possible to port this engine to WebGL2 and WASM and support all platforms via the browser. Maybe that's a silly idea but I think it would be really cool and perhaps easier than porting to Vulkan :)

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You know it actually might be. Three big things it requires are Multi-Draw Indirect (looks to be available in 4.3), shader storage buffers (looks like it's also available in 4.3) and compute shaders which 4.3 should have too.

I don't know much about WebGL2 - do you happen to know if dropping the requirement to GL 4.3 would be enough to make it compatible with WebGL2?

Sorry but I seem to have misunderstood the capabilities of WebGL 2. I had read that WebGL 2 was OpenGL ES 3.0 and that “OpenGL 4.3 provides full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0”. Which means OpenGL ES 3.0 can run in an OpenGL 4.3 environment. Not the other way around… whoops

The OpenGL versions and variants have always been confusing for me.

WebGL 2 is close to desktop OpenGL 3.3. So probably far too outdated for this project.

Have a look at WenGPU -successor to WebGL. It runs on Vulkan

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/webgpu/

Unfortunately WebGL2 doesn't support multi-draw indirect, shader storage buffers, or compute shaders (there was temporary experimental support for compute shaders but it's considered obsolete now).

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