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Learning WebGL

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46 pointsalexkon8 comments

WebGL is pretty close to prime time as of FF 4 and upcoming webkit based browsers. We have been developing in production mode for it in over 4 months now and are pretty satisfied with the results. AFAIK we have only encountered one crash bug, possibly an ATI driver issue, which was easy to work around once diagnosed. Performance isn't as fast as native but close enough for most applications that aren't bleeding edge (read AAA games).

If you're writing any WebGL code, definitely check out the WebGL Inspector:

http://benvanik.github.com/WebGL-Inspector/

Does anyone know which browsers have hardware graphics acceleration for WebGL? Does it work on iPhone/Android, or only desktop browsers?

The current Chrome and Firefox betas both have hardware acceleration for the desktop versions.

WebGL is based on OpenGL ES, the version used by devices like the iPhone, rather than on the full "desktop" OpenGL -- this was apparently a deliberate choice made to make sure that it would work on mobile devices. And Apple are part of the standards group, so presumably it will work on the iPhone at some point.

However -- there are no mobile versions easily available right now.

* You can get a version of Fennec (Firefox mobile) for Android that runs it, but I believe you'd have to build it yourself from source with appropriate flags. Here's a video, anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmiOO71yHQ8 * A while back, an over-the-air firmware upgrade for the Nokia N900 (Maemo smartphone) did activate WebGL, but the version in question is now out-of-date and most current demos won't work with it. Video here: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=2340

Yep, WebGL runs on the Nokia N900 browser out of the box. However, I cannot run a whole lot of the WebGL demos out there, others run out of video memory (textures, I suppose) while others just don't work and don't give any error messages. Some simple tests I've written myself do work.

The thing is, they changed the spec after the PR 1.2 Nokia update that enabled WebGL was released in June or July. In August WebGLFloatArray was renamed to Float32Array because the low-level typed array specification was broken out of WebGL and turned into a separate proposed standard, for example.

So any demos you can run might be old ones that wouldn't run in the current beta browsers!

Kronos told me at SigGraph that we'd see something fully finalized in Q1 - any one know if this is true or not?

I follow the public list where a subset of the spec-writing stuff is discussed, and it sounds likely that the spec will be done before the end of March, yes. There was quite a heavy hint dropped at the start of December: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=2811

Browser support is also likely soon, perhaps even before then -- Chrome 9 and Firefox 4 are almost certain to have WebGL switched on by default (it's on in the current betas, though I guess there's always the chance of a last-minute disaster). And I've heard rumours of February release dates for both.

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