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WebGL Liquid Surface

massa.me

25 pointsdanielfilho9 comments

A webgl experiment that creates a liquid surfece-like enviroment.

There's also a blog post that explains step-by-step process.

WebGL is kinda cool since it runs on the browser without plugins. But it's just a stripped down version of OpenGL with a feature set that roughly corresponds to a GPU circa 2004.

This demo is kinda nice, it runs fast on the GPU but visually it's not much more than palette rotation plasma effects from 1980's and 90's. (Or did I miss something, I was kinda looking forward to see the "water surface" in 3d with lighting and reflection, was that hidden somewhere?)

Don't get me wrong, I like that people write little demos like this and WebGL makes them pretty easily accessible (OpenGL is a bitch to get running). But I'm still kind of frustrated every time something gets hyped and/or HN'd just because it's WebGL, even if we have all seen similar effects a decade ago in demoscene parties.

So keep on writing 'em demos but please stop hyping about WebGL too much. Instead put it to real use and show some games or products with it.

I found the blog post about the demo (here: http://massa.me/blog/?p=1) more interesting than the demo itself.

> I was kinda looking forward to see the "water surface" in 3d with lighting and reflection

http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/ might be more interesting then.

This is kind of the way it goes, we see a lot of demos from people scratching their itch, and then some of those demos will congeal into higher level libraries and toolkits then engines form and finally you see some amazing complete works built on the shoulders of those efforts. WebGL is still in it's infancy but as more and more people scratch their itches we will see less demos and more complete works.

It's the same OpenGL ES 2.0 that is now on mobiles. I doubt you could do something even more complex in browser with Javascript, at least not until Javascript approaches native code speed. Until then there's Native Client.

I believe WebGL is deliberately stripped down so it works identically on mobiles, which today have GPUs equivalent to desktop circa 2004.

OpenGL ES is a more apt comparison. You're precisely correct.

Crashed my 2008 Mac Pro (Chrome 16 stable). Had to do a hard reboot. Great.

Works on Ubuntu 11.09 with Chrome. Hypnotizing!

I got an alert saying "Could not initialize WebGL". Alerts are annoying.

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