WebGL visual programming editor cables.gl is now open source | Hacker News Reader

WebGL visual programming editor cables.gl is now open source

cables.gl

272 pointspandur40 comments

Cables is an incredibly powerful tool with a fairly low learning curve. I couldn't have done what I did with my personal website[1] (sorry, mobile optimized!) if I was working with WebGL directly, especially not in the 3 days it took me to build and deploy with no prior experience.

If you're a interested in experimenting with creative stuff without the traditionally high barrier of entry, I highly recommend cables and the Decode.gl tutorial series[2].

Cables is an exceptionally versatile and user-friendly tool, especially for those new to creative coding. It allowed me to create my personal website[1] (sorry doesn't work on mobile) in just three days, despite having no prior experience. Achieving the same results using WebGL directly would have been significantly more challenging and time-consuming.

For anyone interested in exploring creative digital projects without facing the typically steep learning curve, I strongly suggest giving Cables a try.

Additionally, the Decode.gl[2] tutorial series is extremely high quality

[1] https://zetaphor.com [2] https://decode.gl/

Your comment says the same thing twice, just rephrased. Did ChatGPT write this?

Not quite the same thing!

> my personal website[1] (sorry, mobile optimized!)

> my personal website[1] (sorry doesn't work on mobile)

Fair point

My original comment was a bit rambly and so I had an LLM rephrase it. However I was editing on mobile so I had limited visibility due to the text input sharing space with my keyboard, so I clearly missed this duplicate paragraph. What I'd give for an edit button :P

Not to tell you what to do, but ... please don't do that. Your original comment was better. The rephrased one is both longer and suffers from the same soullessness that pervades all GPT output.

Your original writing was fine! You're fine!

Neither of those is my original comment :P

They were two different versions of the rephrase, I just failed to remove one because I am useless when doing any text editing on mobile

I honestly hoped people wouldn't be that lazy here. Oh well.

This seems like it repeats itself with different words and it also seems to say the same thing twice phrased differently.

> https://decode.gl/

The home page uses 18% of my beefy cpu.

GitHub: https://github.com/cables-gl/cables

Really cool project, love to see things that touch web tech, VPLs, and creative programming. Could not find repo from the website on mobile, would love to see it in the footer or in the CTA.

Here are all repositories of the project https://cables.gl/docs/6_1_developing_cables/0_repositories/...

Web tech is horrible, but creative programming is great.

This reminded me of another project: https://nodes.io. Apparently it was inspired by cables.gl

and cables.gl was inspired by tooll.io and vvvv

nodes.io is developed by the London based studio https://variable.io. It’s a tool they use internally for their client projects.

Cables is absolutely fantastic. I used it personally for an art project, as well as was involved with a commerical AR experience which used cables to run elaborate, fully interactive 3d scenes in a normal browser, on mobile. As with other node based languages (e.g. vvvv, max/msp), you edit your code while it's running, so you directly see what you're doing without constantly switching interfaces. And in the end it generates a js file you can just embed in an iframe. Honestly, no idea why this is not more widely used, huge fan!

I'm so happy every time I see the demoscene on HN's front page. Hi pandur!

Hello ;)

Holon and MFX rocks!!! Big up the demoscene massiv, see you at next Revision

wow <3

This looks really cool, but I came away with some questions.

- How does this differ from say blender's geometry/shader nodes? Aside from operating environment.

- How much of webgl does this encompass? Do you control the full render graph? Or is it just one pass, or what?

I've been interested in learning modern graphics programming, but playing around with low level gl/vk code seemed like it'd be too slow to figure out the high level concepts. I was hoping I'd find a visual editor somewhere.

Operating environment and deployability are practical differences.

Blender can be used to create assets consumed by cables.

Is this essentially Quartz Composer, but in the browser? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer

I was always amazed at how sophisticated QC was, and also saddened when it was abandoned by Apple...

Or TouchDesigner?

yes why did visual programming never fully took off, its somehow like vr ;)

it is like QC or touchdesigner, but you can distribute your projects on your own, without cables itself. basically like you can distribute a game you made with unity.

Most designers on the game industry, sound composition, or electronics would be to differ, but maybe only having three industries that embraced visual programming is too niche. :)

Not everything can be made into a one way graph with limited data types. Node graphs work in specific domains because they only have a few data types and don't need to worry much about side effects, ordering, branching, state and IO.

On top of that you also need a good GUI which itself is rare. Houdini has a great interface that is well designed. Touch designer is much more wonky, loose and awkward.

So... would this let me build GLSL shaders visually, rather than by code trial and error?

Nice to have an open-source alternative to TouchDesigner! Hope the transition to Cables isn't too hard.

Just a heads up, this site (cables.gl) can reliably crash my browser (Firefox 128.0.3 - Linux) completely so that my only options are to quit the browser or restart it.

That's really unusual. I'm also using Firefox on Linux with Wayland on NVIDIA and I've never had an issue. Try checking your system logs and see what went wrong. Maybe an extension is causing problems?

Breaks Safari on mobile as soon as the top video loads. At least the back button works but scrolling or any other gesture doesn't...

What about Web GPU, does cables support that?

We are working on it! That will hopefully be available by the end of this year

Wow this looks really nice. Great work and thanks.

Great stuff, lovely this is open now.

What‘s the license?

MIT

we went for MIT, as it seemed to be the most simple choice. so have at it...

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