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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

Intrigued by this I visited https://www.shadertoy.com/. There does seem to be a thriving community there.

Problem is, the browse pages have a 4x3 grid of live WebGL previews (rather than e.g. static images) of the shadertoys.

On my home desktop pc (win10, i4790k@4Ghz, GTX1070, 24 GB) running Chrome this means that inevitably, on page one or two, at least one of the shadertoys will use so much GPU computation that it starves out all other functionality, like being able to switch tabs etc.

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I've tried to bring this point up in the past as well. All they would need to do is add an MP4 rendering job to replace those with video. Although the transcoding would be quite expensive, I'm sure IQ could set up a donation system.

It is on the roadmap https://trello.com/b/5hM0CjId/shadertoycom-roadmap

And there is a donation system in place https://www.patreon.com/shadertoy

I don't think this project needs more money; they need people who give a shit. (There's a setting that makes the site functional, but you have to register to get to it? What?)

I'm not affiliated with ShaderToy, though I love it. Would you mind clarifying all three of those points? What does giving a shit mean, do they need volunteers to work on the site? And are you sure they don't need money? $700 / month isn't much; having run a lower profile website myself, I'd be surprised if $700 even covers server costs, and it definitely doesn't pay anyone for their time. And what is this setting that makes the site functional? I want that.

I think the technical wtf should become clear if you look at the entire comment tree starting at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041209

But yeah, to clarify: What they primarily need is someone who gives a shit about the site being functional, secondarily money to cover operating costs. Before the first need is covered, just blindly giving some loose group money seems like it would have a high potential of going to waste.

You just convinced me to donate. ;) ShaderToy is free. I'll have to donate for a while just to cover the value I've already gotten from it, and it is a gold mine of share & remix techniques. It seems a bit cynical to call donating to ShaderToy "blindly giving some loose group money", and to just assume the money would be wasted. Since ShaderToy exists, and since it is pretty awesome, and since I know who made it, and since they have a Patreon account asking for money, I assume it will be used towards making more of the awesomeness they already made, improving the experience of the site, and I assume the money won't go to waste, the potential for that seems fairly low to me. Anyway, if it's not your thing, definitely don't use it and don't donate. But do have a happy new year, Cheers!

Using Firefox instead seems to help. Loading the grid pages is still super slow and rendering is broken, but at least you can use the rest of the browser/other tabs.

I think that you can opt for image previews if you create an account. It’s in the options (maybe). The feature is there, I just don’t remember where.

If that's true, wow, that's some hostility towards newcomers.

It’s a side project.

Maybe changing the default would be a good idea? Just a thought :)

I'm trying to code shadergif https://shadergif.com to fix this but of course, the only community I have yet is "me" and I don't have all shadertoy features. I render gifs and preview videos to avoid spamming GPUs.

The code is open source so anyone who wants new features can actually code it (after all, it's a coder community, why not let it code the tool that shadertoy is).

This is great, how are you doing the GIF rendering?

With a client side library (gifjs). I might switch to video for a better quality though.

if you sign in, there's a 'use previews' option in config that will replace the live previews with thumbnails

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