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Comment by aorth | Hacker News Reader

The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in the post is really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive. Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+):

https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/

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WebGL2 brings a few nice features but a lot of the cool stuff is already possible in current WebGL across most browsers.

Here's another WebGL2 demo I had the opportunity to work on — the WebGL 1 version looks pretty similar. :)

http://www.jam3.com/work/#mozilla-webgl

Is it? I mean, it's nice that it can be played "in the browser" but from a graphics fidelity perspective (and artistic direction, but that's beside the point) it's not impressive. It looks like 6-7 year old game graphics, without the interactivity and complexity.

I don't know why you were downvoted. This demo doesn't feel more impressive than the 13 year old Half Life 2, let alone the 10 year old Crysis. Both interactive games rather than a tech demo.

Well, i think the clouds are procedural and you get soft edges in the water. But yeah, i like the scene but the performance is abysmal (45 FPS on "Ultra" on my GTX980 for a scene that generally looks emptier and more repeat-y than what you see when you exit Half-Life 2's metro station).

I'm not sure if it is because of WebGL 2, Firefox, the PlayCanvas engine or just this demo though. But unless WebGL 2 imposes big performance penalties, i doubt this is representative of what could be done.

And what's even worse, so many drivers have issues when compiling shaders that were writen maliciously (or even regular ones), that I'd say we'll see security problems with this really soon, the same we saw them when web fonts started to pop in and code that dealt with fonts simply wasn't written with security in mind

It's a combination of problems but IMHO mostly due to things like: lack of tooling, immaturity of graphics libraries and especially immaturity of WebGL2 in those libraries, and modelling/art direction.

The technology is pretty capable but the ecosystem around it pales in comparison to the platforms driving many of today's AAA and indie games.

Unity and Unreal both provide limited exporting to WebGL.

This keeps crashing Firefox for me when I try it on a Mac

Can you share a link to a Firefox crash report from your about:crashes page? Does the site crash when loading or after you start playing the demo?

You might be seeing the following GeForceGLDriver crash:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333534

Mine crashes after all the assets have been loaded. Having trouble getting the report, sorry!

Type about:crashes into the location bar and hit enter to find your crashes.

What year and model is your Mac?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB

I did run into this driver issue. I have that same machine, so I'm looking into it.

Mine just pans the view upwards. Nothing I do on the trackpad will get it to recentre. It's a very beautiful view of the sky I get :D

51.0, MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015.)

Same model laptop but I'm stuck spinning counter-clockwise instead of panning up.

Now I'm back in the office with a wired in mouse, it's working fine.

Build once, test everywhere!

Same here on Windows 10 with a GT 240M, using DX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3 drivers.

I just upgraded to FF 51 on debian from mozilla.debian.org and when I click your link I get this message: "This demo requires WebGL 2.0 support. Please update to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox."

Just to check, what is the "webgl.enable-webgl2" preference set to in your Debian Firefox? You can use about:config to check this.

Surprisingly, it says "true"

OK. What does "window.WebGLRenderingContext" return when evaluated in the console? What about "window.WebGL2RenderingContext"?

They both print nothing to the console. However, the console greets me with an interesting message:

> Error: WebGL: Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed: * WebGL 2 requires support for the following features: get_integer64_indexed * Exhausted GL driver options.

Could this have something to do with having the 32 bit version instead of the 64 bit version?

I'm asking around to see what might be going on, but it's more likely to have to do with the specific graphics card and drivers you have than with 32-bit vs 64-bit.

Does about:support say anything interesting in the "graphics" section?

There you go: http://imgur.com/R3GVqSx

the "graphic card" would be Intel's HD Graphics...

edit: the problem seems to be (somewhat) debian related. I found this on SE (see first answer):

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207855/cant-get-int...

EDIT 2: After installing the correct drivers from the backport repository it finally works!! Thanks for your support!

Excellent!

The day will come when graphics drivers aren't a pain. It really will. I have faith, and have for decades... ;)

Works for me also on Chrome 56 beta on Ubuntu 16.04 and a GeForce GT 640 (Driver 367.57)

http://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl2

"I don't play games" is such a weird comment to me, just like "I don't read books" or "I don't watch TV" - writing off an entire medium seems rash. (Even if you are just stating you don't, rather than you wouldn't - the fact you identify yourself as not doing so presumably means you are not going to try some of the great works out there).

Although, to be fair, I guess "I don't read poetry".

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