WebGL Water (2010) | Hacker News Reader

WebGL Water (2010)

madebyevan.com

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Saw the “made by Evan Wallace” and went “huh, that sounds familiar…”

Yeah, not surprising this guy went on to build Figma! Super cool

He push and work on the implementation of Rust [1] and WebAssembly [2] to the tool.

[1] https://medium.com/figma-design/rust-in-production-at-figma-...

[2] https://medium.com/figma-design/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-...

As well as esbuild. I wonder what he's doing these days since he stepped out of Figma.

My Rust CAD library is based on his CSG.js: https://github.com/timschmidt/csgrs

Back in 2010, this "require[d] a decent graphics card"

Now, my phone's integrated graphics can run it very smoothly. Moore's law at play.

Here I am running just fine on a 3 year old phone

It's running fine (not too smoothly but ok) on my 8 years old Xiaomi MI6.

My old phone is running it at exactly Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension fps

Same on a not-old Pixel 8

Works well for me even on a 50€ (fifty euro!) chinese tablet I bought a few weeks ago.

Everyone forgets what machines are capable of if you actually optimize. This game did everything shown here in real time on phones 14 years ago https://youtu.be/JDvPIhCd8N4

Have you heard of KKrieger? So yeah, if you optimize enough, machines can do quite cool stuff!

I think KKrieger required pretty beefy specs for the time. It's a different kind of optimization they were aiming for (code size Vs execution speed)

Although a friend of mine ran it on an integrated intel GPU recently and it performed great.

The in suit battery driven hamdwarmer he invented it!

I remember this running well on a low end macbook pro back then.

This is my most voted submission. This thing literally never gets old

Here is a trick: pause the simulation and drag the ripples back and forth really fast, it will create a "mega" wave. Then unpause and it will create a massive tsunami

Or pause it and click the water surface 100 times to raise up a lot of potential energy that makes a very profound wave front when it comes down when you start it.

Demoscene never gets old, but why we get then so little submissions of it here? Demoscene reifies the creative-hacking culture, is it not?

Be the change you want to see

On this note, can anyone recommend basic webgl 2d effects tutorial? I have a super exciting project I'm really close to announcing, but the last step is adding some pretty Animal Well style effects via webgl2, but I know practically nothing about webgl except the very very basics that you learn from webgl2fundamentals.org. Any pointers would be appreciated.

Webgl2fundamentals is pretty great :)

I like https://thebookofshaders.com/ . It’s unfinished and I don’t think it’s been updated in years, but what’s there is pretty good

I second this! Shame it’s still not finished though. I did this tutorial like 5 years ago

shadertoy.com

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XXyGzh

... this is amazing!

I can't wait to dig in and figure out how to add effects like this over my 2d content!

It’s super easy. ShaderToy draws a rectangle on the screen and runs the given shader on it. There’s a small amount of plumbing to wire in a few variables like time & mouse position, and your texture coordinates. The rendering part of ShaderToy is simple enough that you can make your own clone in a day. The rest of the site is the hard part, the editor, the API & saving shaders in the cloud, getting lots of people to write awesome shaders, etc., but the rendering part is near trivial.

The "problem" with it is that you only learn about fragment shaders, you should also learn about the WebGL API, and vertex shaders.

Not having to learn the API & vertex shaders is definitely a feature of ShaderToy, not a problem. :P The extremely low barrier to entry to writing shaders is one of it’s best qualities. Anyway, the question asked about 2d effects, so they maybe don’t need vertex shaders, and they can of course learn the small amount of WebGL API needed somewhere else like https://webgl2fundamentals.org/.

"Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension WebGL Water Made by Evan Wallace

This demo requires a decent graphics card and up-to-date drivers. If you can't run the demo, you can still see it on YouTube.

Interactions: Draw on the water to make ripples Drag the background to rotate the camera Press SPACEBAR to pause and unpause Drag the sphere to move it around Press the L key to set the light direction Press the G key to toggle gravity Features: Raytraced reflections and refractions Analytic ambient occlusion Heightfield water simulation * Soft shadows Caustics (see this for details) * * requires the OES_texture_float extension * requires the OES_standard_derivatives extension" on Android Chrome.

Wasnt this one of the demo that Figma co-founder used make a case for web-based editor?

This is probably the first time (not counting ignored times) it was been posted which doesn't have comments about breakage on some browser.

Makes you wonder how long it takes that WebGPU reaches the same status.

I see three such comments, all posted before you posted. Oh well. I'd hoped you were right about this.

Ah, I didn't reload before writing the comment. Oh well.

This has always been my "is webgl working?" test page

By the way, I think it's (2011) not (2010)

Still. My god.

After all these years, Android Chrome still doesn't support the extensions required by this demo, this is the issue with Web 3D adoption.

Works fine for me.

Actually, I just cross-checked on WebGL Report, and it does indeed support the extension, not that changes having a black page complaining the extension is missing.

Same for me on. Getting this error - Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension WebGL Water

Using - Chrome 136.0.7103.87 Android 15;

I guess I'm the only one for whom this doesn't work I get:

'Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension'

You must be on a very old browser, a terminal browser, ladybird, something like that. PEBCAK. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OES_texture...

I'm also getting the error on Android, latest Chrome.

Latest Firefox on Android does seem to work, oddly enough. How the turntables...

Nope. Using Chrome 136.0.7103.87 on Android.

Getting this error on a brand new Pixel 9 Pro, latest Chrome. Odd

Install Firefox. Not joking.

When this was made in 2010 mobile phones had no WebGL support at all.

Ironically Chrome was also the only browser that supported it without beta flags, looks like their mobile version never caught up.

Very cool!

Something I noticed is that you can’t make perturbations on the surface of the water by rapidly moving the ball beneath the water.

Don’t have time to dig into the sim to know why, but that is a monitor flaw.

Later edit: ah, looks like rendering was the focus not sim, per the maker’s website.

When you move the ball up, but keep it still under water, you'll see the water level rise.

Why?

To encourage you to file a PR

Is this open source?

https://github.com/evanw/webgl-water

…so how does water look like in 2025 on WebGPU?

This is incredible. My goodness.

This example never ceases to amaze

If you are on Android try Kiwi browser to see this

What does Kiwi do different? The water appears to work well on Brave.

5 year old low end Motorola Android with Firefox and ublock. Smooth as a baby's bottom. Genuinely surprised!

Kiwi is deprecated by the way, use Firefox or just use Chrome which is what Kiwi was anyway.

Some features of Kiwi were merged to Edge, which means it now supports extensions (any extension if using developer options in Canary)

Pretty cool how a basic demo like this still feels fresh, even on my old phone. Always makes me want to mess with web tech more.

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