WebGL game: Tankworld | Hacker News Reader

WebGL game: Tankworld

playtankworld.com

58 pointsRaphael16 comments

Played it for a few minutes and dominated a handful of tanks with the helicopter. I'm usually a huge fan of this style of game but I think they are more fun in 2D than this style of 3D.

I wish someone would make a MMO version of the Tank game on Wii Play. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMqEoZivjnU)

Incorrect title. From the about page: "The engine does not use WebGL because most people don't have enabled it yet."

This is not a WebGL game.

It is.

## WebGL Test version... ##

The WebGL version of Tankworld is under construction. If your browser supports WebGL then you can already check out a preview level...[1]

1. http://www.playtankworld.com/level/60_second_shooting_range?...

Wireframy and not as smooth as the other (flash I suppose) version with latest Chromium on arch linux. Too bad.

I thought it was Canvas2D and not WebGL... ?

The test version is now replaced with a new version which runs a lot smoother...

One of the major problems with the test version was the rotation of the tiles which was done within the perspective matrix. The tiles were also rendered separately. In the new engine those problems are fixed along with the texturing of the ground.

Cute but not terribly fun.

The strange horizon made my neck hurt.

The helicopter is imba, runs great. :)

Terribly hard to aim.

Smooth!

Hmm, is Chrome's WebGL implementation just so slow or why feels the game so sluggish? I assumed WebGL was using 3d HW accel?

When I tried to play that game in Chrome my computer locked me out! (yeah, that wasn't a failure mode I even knew existed).

So consider yourself lucky.

It's slow for me too (Chrome on Linux) but I thought that was because I don't have hardware acceleration working on my Acer netbook. What hardware/OS are you using?

Yeah, Chrome is not fully hardware accelerated yet and I don't think it will be until at least v11. In a recent test by DownloadSquad it seems they are the ones behind the most in this, even behind Opera. I don't know why they missed this opportunity and didn't give it a higher priority. It's the same problem with hardware acceleration on Android all over again.

It's almost like Google and anything graphics related don't mix, even though improving full hardware acceleration performance is probably as important for the further development of the web as improving Javascript performance was. I think this will be where the new battle between browsers will be in 2011 and 2012 at least.

Here's the benchmark video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU-cpc8XpDo

> I don't think it will be until at least v11

In 11.0.691.0 canary, GPU acceleration of Canvas is still an option in about:flags, just as it is in 9.0.597.107. GPU accelerated compositing is no longer optional, though, it appears. Of course, that's only the canary build, and I expect that the 11.x build that's actually released will be somewhat different, but still.

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