The future of O3D | Hacker News Reader

The future of O3D

blog.chromium.org

34 pointsfelixmar7 comments

Ouch, this is very disappointing. O3D was technologically better approach than WebGL.

JavaScript is a perfect scripting/glue language, but unfortunately it still sucks at numerical computations.

Yes, even with all the massive progress that happened recently with V8/TraceMonkey/Carakan. Try working with large arrays and you will weep.

Well, good news is at least this will force JS engine developers to improve this so far neglected aspect.

Ugh, JavaScript! We'll be stuck with JavaScript forever! Time for a new browser to be developed. But I doubt that will happen. Sad to see no major new operating systems, pc architectures, browsers being developed. Now it's all: - linux, osx, windows - intel - ff, webkit, opera Yep, people standing on the shoulders of giants but we need some new giants.

NativeClient will support other languages and through a new plugin API, they'll be able to link up with HTML, CSS just like JS can.

Only the other browsers have to agree to implement it. Minor little problem.

Reposting from another submission of this: This is a little annoying. Google had not said a word about O3D for months and they just announce now that they want to drop the plugin. I think a better idea would have been to use the plugin as a way to provide WebGL and o3d to older browsers until WebGL is widespread. Some of the O3D features are not even possible in WebGL.

EDIT: the google group thread explaining about this: http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss/browse_thread/thr....

EDIT: Google reiterated that they prefer that Google Frame implements WebGL for IE instead of turning O3D into a complete HTML5 implementation to support api O3D/WebGL developers need.

Whee. Hopefully this will help accelerate WebGL-adoption even further and we can avoid getting locked in to yet another proprietry plugin, in the form of Unity.

I've a feeling that good tools and engines for WebGL-based are going to be needed though.

I thought they'd use O3D together with NativeClient which is open source. I doubt Google would bother with some proprietary plugin, their entire OS is open source.

NativeClient would make plugins second nature to the web. They could be downloaded and installed as seamlessly as javascript frameworks.

But since they have no guarantee that NativeClient will be adopted as a standard, they're not putting all of their eggs in that basket. Apparently they can get the speed out of WebGL some other way.

I really hope this takes off. I've been wanting to get into making some 3D games for a while, and being able to do it in the browser would be awesome

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