This week I’ve taken a bit of a break on the coding. I instead decided to spend a few days coming up with a more impressive demo. Please bare in mind I’m no pro CG artist, just a now and then amateur, so imagine what could be achieved by the pros in a very short space of time. It’s not showing off 100% of the current feature set, some of which I think still needs rewriting and finishing off. But, hopefully it’ll be enough to change the mind of at least some of the WebGL naysayers, encourage more rapid development and make 2010 the year of 3D on the web.
Annoyingly it isn’t working on firefox (at least not my GFX card) there seems to be a bug where you can only map 4 textures to a shader 
Hopefully, they’ll get that fixed soon. In the mean time I’ve tested it on chrome and it runs at an okay frame rate, although I do think it’s time to get some optimization in there.
UPDATE: Great news, looks like it’s working in firefox now.
UPDATE 2:It seems to depend on your graphics card so doesn’t work for all in firefox ATM. If it’s not working for you could you post GFX card and browser and I’ll attempt to track down the issues ASAP.
UPDATE 3: I think it may be fixed on the mac, but without one to test it on it’s hard to tell. crossing fingers and toes!
The Video:(Still trying to figure out how to capture well in linux)
Hi,
maybe you could try to merge multiple textures into one single texture? E.g. if your textures are 1024×1024, put four into one single 2048×2048 texture. Maybe you will need a small gap between the textures. Also it could be worth a try to encode a texture in the (otherwise unused) alpha channel of three other textures.
Screencapture in Linux does work well with recordMyDesktop. At least for Fedora there is a GTK and QT front-end in the repository.
P.S.: Demo looks great! However, I have only Firefox, so it doesn’t work for me.
I did consider that, merging into one texture would greatly increase the size of the download texture(aiming for <1mb for all gziped). But as this is the web, I though I would assume the issue would be fixed shortly so it'll be win win small download and max detail, at least in the long run.
I did considered using multiple channels in an single image as masking alphas but I still always seemed to come up one short, three for color two for normals and one for masks but that put's it over the bug limit and I didn't want to compromise. I also thought about using multiple meshes but then my brains started trickling out my ears so I thought I'd just sleep.
Thanks for the screen cap tip
Live demo doesn’t seem to work for me in any of safari, chrome, ff, or latest webkit
Very cool! Some good news, too: I just tried it in the latest Firefox and it looks like they’ve fixed whatever the bug is, because it worked just fine: 60fps.
Not to mention that OpenGL is hard even for computer scientists, WebGL will be open to numerious attacks. Average javascript geek could not even use 2D canvas efficiently. It will remain as an optional feature for the browsers. I really do not see how it would be a permanent one.
hmm, no worky for me on Minefield:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091221 Minefield/3.7a1pre
[...] been creating for his demos. GLGE has its own website (I recommend you check out the first demo), where Paul describes it as “WebGL for the lazy”: “[t]he aim of GLGE is to mask [...]
Doesn’t work for me in a WebKit nightly either. I don’t even see any errors in the console. Where have you tried running it?
Currently there seems to be an issue with mac, I suspect it’s a shader issue, I’m looking into it now. I works for some on the firefox nightly on the PC, chrome on PC but not sure about webkit on PC yet.
Doesn’t work for me with firefox nightly either. Just see a white canvas. My setup: Gecko/20100104 Minefield/3.7a1pre on Ubunut 9.10 64bit with geforce 7600gs. The error console gives Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "An invalid or illegal string was specified" code: "12" nsresult: "0x8053000c (NS_ERROR_DOM_SYNTAX_ERR)" location: "http://www.glge.org/demo/GLGE_files/glge.js Line: 3181"] like crazy.
This is so great! Thank you. Works both in Firefox and Chromium Linux.
It’s hard to believe!
In recent years, the technology makes strong progress. The library has a lot of potential.
Excellent! Works on WebKit nightlies now, at 55fps! Can you tell me if it was a content problem, or did you have to work around a bug in the WebKit impl? I want to make sure I keep WebKit working according to spec.
Also, this scene looks very familiar. Where is it from?
Hey wanted to say I’ve been playing with WebGL recently and then found your demo, and I’m really impressed! I spent about a week on my demo and it doesn’t have half as many features or run as well.
Have you considered hosting the code on GitHub? Was wanting to poke around with the code and maybe even help out if time allows. Both of those things are easier on GitHub
FYI the demo works great for me in OSX/Webkit.
yeap, that’s where I’m hosting the code atm.
http://github.com/supereggbert/GLGE
My bad, totally missed that. Thanks, forked!
[...] created a library called GLGE, “WebGL for the lazy”, which you may like to look at; there’s a demo here, though as of this writing (4 Jan 2009) it’s not yet working in all browser/OS [...]
it is not running on Safari (4.0.4) or Chrome (4.0.249.49 (35163) beta) on the mac. Using MacBookPro with GeForce 9400M.
crap doesn’t work for me – 140fps all white screen
nvidia 9700m gts on vista 64, minefield 3.7pre
GeForce GTX 260M
Windows 7
Minefield 3.7a1pre
Blank/white canvas, >150 fps.
Good luck
Hi. Great work! But this demo doesn’t work for me. Blank white screen. 67fps. The shadows demo works fine though. Weird.
Minefield 3.7a1pre
nVidia GeForce 9500 GT (512Mb)
Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.something
No errors shown in the console.
If you only get a white canvas change “gl.activeTexture(gl["TEXTURE"+i]);” in glge.js to “try { gl.activeTexture(gl["TEXTURE"+i]); } catch (e) { continue; }”
good tip but you will lose some of the textures
Not working on osx 10.5 MineField
Great stuff, but doesn’t work: ff 3.7.a1pre nvidia 8800gtx, windows 7
amazing