Light Tracer – Experimental GPU ray tracer for web | Hacker News Reader

Light Tracer – Experimental GPU ray tracer for web

lighttracer.org

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After clicking "Try it now", I see a loading spinner for a while and then a an empty blue page.

Console outputs a bunch of stuff:

wasm streaming compile failed: TypeError: Response has unsupported MIME type

Assertion failed: glGetError() == 0, at: src/deps\sokol_gfx.h,3008,_sg_create_image

WebGL warning: texImage2D: Requested size at this level is unsupported.

uncaught exception: abort("Assertion failed: glGetError() == 0, at: src/deps\\sokol_gfx.h,3008,_sg_create_image") at jsStackTrace@http://lighttracer.org/index.js:1170:13

On Firefox 67 on Linux.

This site really needs HTTPS. The app is fun, but please add HTTPS.

Caustics look pretty good after increasing the number of passes: https://gc.gy/28927731.png

Does exposing GPU functions to the browser mean that my gaming PC will be mining ether for random sites? Compared to btc/cpu attacks, the reward here would be ludicrous

Already happening around the web. A new monetization strategy for web apps pay to 'opt out'

If you care about it, you shouldn't allow any kind of JavaScript to run.

Yes

Needs some selection editor, ability to view the scene nodes as a tree or other representation and make selections. I tried loading an obj of a face, with groups for the face parts, eyeballs, and inner mouth. I can really only change the view because I can only select one geometry group to manipulate, not all or a parent to multiple groups within the obj geometry. Selecting one part is sorta useless, unless one can select multiple for group operations.

According to the github issue tracker, it's supposed to also work in Safari, but there's a bug somewhere and they don't know how to find and fix it.

Is there a report on bugs.webkit.org? I’m curious what’s going on on the WK side, and that’s superior to the great black hole of radar

I'm not sure the name is good because light tracing means 'ray tracing from the light to the camera'.

Light tracing gives the best results in theory, but it not very usefull because a lot of rays will be rendered without ever ending up in the camera. Which is ofcourse a waste of resourses.

Looks like this is a 'normal' path tracer.

It’s true that ”light tracing” is some times used to describe forward-only ray tracing, but I don’t think there is much confusion added by the term here. Anyone who knows the terminology (so could be confused) also knows that no efficient path tracer is forward only.

I am not sure what is going on, but on my Mac, clicking "Try it out" brings the beach ball and crashes the Finder! 100% reproducible... so be careful if you don't want to loose everything you are working on before clicking...

Getting a black screen on iOS Chrome

That’s because browsers on iOS can’t use their own engine and have to use Safaris. Unfortunately, Safari is not supported.

Closed source, it seems?

> It appears you are using Firefox browser

> Unfortunately open file dialog is unsupported at the moment in this browser.

> Please try to drop a file into the browser instead

Ah the IE memories!

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