CSS-Powered 3D Engine (2014)
keithclark.co.uk
keithclark.co.uk
https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/06/nopen-source/
The company claimed to have a secret sauce for accelerating HTML5 graphics, which turned out to be the matrix3d() function for CSS transforms.
I still see too many WebGL demos that struggle on devices where native GL ES doesn't have any issues.
The demos seem to run smoothly & are pretty impressive IMHO.
“By bypassing the CSS and HTML renderers to talk directly to the graphics processing unit, Famo.us could supposedly make 3D physics and other visual wizardry common with native games run smoothly for apps in a mobile or web browser.”
But avoiding DOM layout and its performance issues was relatively innovative at the time. It wasn't unheard of, but no one had really turned it into a framework like they did.
"During the company’s debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Startup Battlefield competition, rather than giving a traditional pitch, Famo.us CEO Steve Newcomb spent his whole six minutes asking people to imagine what could be done if apps were 3D instead of 2D and demoing a floating periodic table. [...] just days earlier, the team made its first pivot away from what it called BenchRank, a ranking system for people, into an HTML5 development platform."
"When TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha visited [their offices], [Famo.us's CEO] pointed to some desks that seemed adequate, but insisted they would be replaced soon because they weren’t the right kind of wood."
It is now 2019 and the front page of famous.co has a big video and a pre-order button. One begins to wonder if this is an actual company, or an excuse to get a lot of VC so its CEO and a few lucky employees can afford to have nice places to live in SF.
http://diana-adrianne.com/purecss-francine/
How it works:
https://bubblin.io/cover/abcd-animal-book-by-judith-neumann#...
The upper link can absolutely grind Android Chrome to a halt.
Force closing the app doesn't fix it either, as chrome reopens the last tab you had open, so the only way out is to completely wipe the browser data which is a little annoying.
They might be "different teams" doing each, but they all have finite resources to pay them.
And no, this sort of thing isn’t particularly high priority. If lots of websites used these technologies to this extent then it’d be higher up the priority list I’m sure.
That's nice -- does that replace all rendering parts with the new Rust (servo?) equivalents?
Or are some parts still in the C++ codebase? (rendering related, not the UI code/JS engine, etc).
The diagram on the link seems to imply this is the last part! Does that mean there's some drawing library (akin to Skia) written in Rust used by WebRender too?
Techies and power users were never going to give Edge a second glance, because they launched without plugin support (i.e. no way to block ads).
I remember seeing his old one in 2012 and spending an 8 hour plane ride with a bottle of vodka and a laptop trying to recreate the windows maze screensaver the same way. (Needless to say, the vodka was the only winner)
Running on Chrome on Android on a Pixel XL I did encounter the following:
* Freelook camera allowed for too fast of movement, the engine struggled to keep up. Panning back to polys that were in view less than a second before reveals that they've been unloaded the instant I looked away. This allowed me to see through walls to polys that should have been fully occluded and would have been much safer to cull. What was rendered would only seem to update if I moved either stick, and so after I started to have issues I never managed to have a correctly rendered frame again. Loading missing polys would mean bringing more unloaded polys into view. Seems like one of those bugs where I would believe it took 5 seconds or 50 hours of work to resolve.
* I did start to notice the vertical seams on the barrels on my second time through, this time with the automatic camera mode. Once I noticed them, I wasn't able to stop, it was very distracting.
EDIT: I went back in to confirm, the mobile control version does not show vertical barrel seams, while the auto camera version does. Different builds for each perhaps?
He's a clever guy
This is what I use to do this : http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/demos/les-frigos-de-paris
Kudos to the good people working on it!
Since the browsers black list GPUs and platforms where they have issues, as author you don't have any guarantee how the users will get to see your site.
Additional not all GL ES features are exposed to WebGL.