Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

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As others have pointed out:

1. I click in Firefox and it just works

2. I click in IE and it just works

3. I click on my iPhone and it just works

… repeat as desired …

That's never been true of OpenGL (or 3D in general) before so there's always been this divide in what people consider possible for a web app (i.e. convenient, easily shared) and the conventional software model where someone needs to download and install something first – a big step up in delay and complexity, and a reasonable hesitation for the security-conscious.

The excitement comes from the fact that now none of that is necessary for many uses – if you're working on a non-AAA game, 3D object viewer, interactive diagram, etc. etc. etc. you get support for 70% of web users globally without having to take on the expense of desktop development and support or supporting so many different toolchains. This isn't a big change for the major players who are still going to do that for other reasons but it simplifies a ton of casual usage.

Plug, but the ga.me people (https://ga.me/) work just down the road from me and are doing some pretty amazing stuff with WebGL games. OK, it’s not AAA, but worst it’s as least as good as the majority of Kongregate stuff and best it’s much better. And this is all just in the browser, no engine download or plugin necessary.

Wow, impressive! And on an open platform, too: http://news.turbulenz.com/post/49430669886/turbulenz-engine-...

It really isn't true. It doesn't just work. I'm running Chrome 38 on a modern desktop PC and it doesn't render at a reasonable frame rate.

You're missing the point.

WebGL runs everywhere that is objectively a Good Thing™. Your criticism is aimed at the optimisation rather than the technology.

The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics.

Additionally WebGL can also be utilised for things which only get rendered once (e.g. single 3D frames). Like generating 3D graphs for one suitable example.

> The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics.

If they wanted to, they could even auto-scale the quality based on frame-rate to ensure that everybody had a good experience.

Cool but had to close the window 'cause CPU fans were creating turbulence in the room.

Check out chrome://gpu to see whether your specific driver is blacklisted - it sounds like you're hitting software rendering. GL becoming a mainstream feature has put pressure on vendors to ship fixes for known bugs – the Chrome team usually links to the actual bug reports so you can see why something is disabled.

Right now, this is still maturing – e.g. for me that demo runs great even on an old iPhone 4S, 2010 MacBook Air, etc. but on a lowest-bidder Dell laptop with the cheapest possible Intel integrated graphics, it struggles. One hardware generation refresh, however, and even the cheap equipment is adequate for many uses - after all, that 2010 MBA was only $1k 4 years ago.

The upshot is that the excitement is because this is finally reaching the point where support will have matured by the time most people will ship a serious app. There are already some interesting WebGL-only applications like Polarr (https://www.polarr.co/editor) which suggest that the model is already plausible for many projects.

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