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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please tell me why I should be excited about these demos? Am I not just seeing an OpenGL wrapper in the browser?

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Because it runs in any browser, even mobile ones and requires basically 0 time for compilation and no plugins as opposed to unity, unreal or other engines.

On mobile, though, it's total!y non interactive. I can see a guy in a boat and that's it. It's like quakelive, except you can play quakelive against loads of people, not just stare at the title screen.

In the original old version there is a joystick for controlling the boat: labs.gooengine.com/pearl-boy/

Except, that technically speaking what we are viewing at has been available on desktop for years. There is nothing cutting-edge about this demo, except that it's in a different shell.

I just don't quite understand why everyone is getting so excited about individual demos.

On some mobile ones.

One thing that is regular on WebGL demos is that it is always a mixed experience on my devices ranging from Android 4.3 to 5.0.

All are from Samsung and Asus.

Native demos work 100% without hiccups.

I don't think you can ever expect the same level of quality and performance that you get with a native program that gets specifically compiled for a certain platform, and sometimes written specifically for it. With WebGL it is just JS, and with GooCreate you can make really cool scenes that can include interactivity (with state machine and no coding or with custom scripts) and then just press publish and have it available for millions of people... no need to compile for several minutes for each different platform and no need for huge downloads.

I have been forced to take the battery out as a way to kill webgl pages on my mobile devices, due to the way they hogged the CPU.

Nice idea, execution is still lacking on mobile.

Just like you have to kill any native app for mobile, even though a native app is obviously much more efficient. I think you are missing the point a bit... it is not about making the most performant or visually impressive thing out there. It is about how easy it is to make something that looks good, performs acceptably and runs pretty much everywhere with basically zero effort in terms of porting.

Except your description only applies to desktop class machines.

I am not missing the point, as 99% of the WebGL demos I see being thrown around don't run out of the box on mobile devices that most people have, as you imply.

GooCreate's renderer is based upon ThreeJS, which is a high level library upon of WebGL (which is essentially OpenGL in the browser.)

Actually it's based on our own engine, Goo Engine, also open source: https://github.com/GooTechnologies/goojs

But yeah, still essentially OpenGL in the browser :)

I wrote a bunch of ThreeJS and I see code I wrote in your Goo Engine. You also have the ThreeJS license in your license:

https://github.com/GooTechnologies/goojs/blob/master/COPYING...

"GooCreate's renderer is based upon ThreeJS". With that I thought you meant that our tool (Goo Create) was built on three.js which it is not. Yes a subset of a few files in the engine contains some code from other open source libraries. Mostly it is a derivative of my previous open source (Java) engines Ardor3D/jMonkeyEngine and new code.

" a subset of a few files in the engine contains some code from other open source libraries"

The code that is ThreeJS derived includes most of the 3D engine classes including:

The main Renderer class (!). As well as the Texture, Camera, RenderTarget, ShaderLib, ShaderBuilder, EventTarget classes. Also the majority of the stuff in the /math, /lights, /pass directories.

GooEngine's renderer (not game engine) was clearly forked from ThreeJS some time ago and diverged (significantly in some places and for the better) but the lineage is clear.

You are right Ben! The rendeder contains a bunch! (Still a subset of the engine like i said)

Hail open source! :)

You can play games with graphics as advanced as this without the effort and security risk of installing something.

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