Pearl Boy WebGL Demo | Hacker News Reader

Pearl Boy WebGL Demo

gooengine.com

163 pointshiteshtr80 comments

This was showcased along many other great WebGL demos a month ago: http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/webgl-...

Awesome graphics and low time-to-crate: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

This actually worked great om my BlackBerry Z10. I had no idea it supported WebGL, thought it was going to be a write up along with the demo i could read but was pretty surprised when the demo kicked in.

Graphics look great and everything feels smooth, hope they make a game out of it.

Thanks for all the nice compliments and thanks for pointers on where we need to improve things ! :-)

Consider signing up for the alpha, we hope we can let in another round of users soon !

Do you prevent default action in keyboard and click handlers? In Opera and Firefox I can sometimes see focus outline and text selection flashing, probably activated by my 1-key keyboard shortcuts.

Good question. I looked at the code and it appears we preventDefault for mouseup and mousedown but not for keyup and keydown. I will ask around why that's the case. Can you give me an example keyboard shortcut where this is happening ?

W and S in Opera select paragraphs (if you enable advanced shortcuts like I did). In Firefox I'm able to drag and select whole canvas (entire screen flashes light blue).

this was on the frontpage already a while ago, cant find the HN discussion link but this was the linked content: http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/webgl-...

Its looks nice and all, but these kind of WebGL demos arent all that impressive anymore now that we have seen things like the unreal engine running in the browser. http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

There isnt really alot you cannot do with WebGL today. If i showed you this as a compiled C++ demo, most probably wouldnt be impressed.

But i find the loading time of unreal engine very slow, their is more to happen

Not great if your keyboard is in Dvorak :-)

Yup, this is a real problem with game input on the Web platform right now. You can't get geographic keycodes, only virtual keycodes. I haven't stumbled on any specification / API proposal to fix this. Anybody know if browser vendors have something in the works?

Until then an option to choose Dvorak for the user and manual remapping of the keys would work for apps that want to support those keyboards.

good idea !

Yeah but then you need to support AZERTY (French), QWERTZ (Central Europe) and lots of other layouts too if you want to cover most people.

Interestingly, it uses WASD for rowing, but the arrow keys (or the mouse) for diving.

I think this is my favorite WebGL demo of all time: http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/

In case anyone else has this problem: I had to disable AdBlock for it to recognise mouse clicks/movement.

Thanks. Also, I had to turn off Firefox Quick Find in Advanced -> General -> "Search for text when I start typing"

This is the first WebGL demo I've seen on HN (or anywhere else, but I don't exactly go looking for them) that not only works, but works very well, in Chromium on Ubuntu.

Granted, I'm on 11.10, so perhaps my browser is a bit out of date... still, though, it's kind of nice to see what all the fuss is about. The game played very smoothly for me.

I'm Chromium 25 on Ubuntu, and I get "Your browser doesn't seem to support HTML5 and WebGL. The best thing to do is upgrade to a modern browser that supports all the awesome things the web has to offer"

Some graphics cards won't work.

For me, it worked great. Until it crashed my entire browser.

On linux, the nvidia driver will happily and reliably panic my entire system when I try these things. Thank goodness I'm on different hardware now.

Does this page work or you: http://get.webgl.org

I had that problem on my laptop. You can fix it for some cards by disabling the gpu check:

Go to chrome://flags and enable the "override software rendering list" flag. That fixed it on mine.

Edit: I have a Radeon Mobility HD 4250 card

I really enjoy seeing new WebGL games emerge. This one is very fluid and beautiful.

But it's not a game, out of curiosity, are there any good games written in WebGL(because all I see are demos)?

https://triggerrally.com/

The problem is that most web developers aren't game developers, and most game developers aren't web developers. So you either end up with demos that aren't any fun, or games that are terrible browser experiences.

Game design is hard, so eventually we will have to converge on a series of design guidelines that make for great browser experiences and fun games.

Our (goo's) idea is to make it easier for game developers to make web based games, so you don't have to be a web developer to get a great browser experience. Still quite early in the process, but I have a good feeling.

http://www.runescape.com has been rewritten entirely in WebGL, they just released the beta and are upgrading the entire game in the next month or so.

It's pretty big news, as far as I know they are the first major MMO to swap to WebGL. They were using Java and had been building on it for nearly 10 years but they found that WebGL offered better graphics performance and easier programming than it's Java equivalent so decided to switch. It is slower, probably around 10 or 15%, but offset by all the new graphical features, longer draw distances, more vivid colours, etc.

they are still using java , just checked 1 hour ago.

"they just released the beta and are upgrading the entire game in the next month or so."

"Don't Starve" uses webGL, but is packaged as a native app.

You could try my charityware WebGL game at http://www.penguinspuzzle.appspot.com/

Incredibly flickery, and the camera and player character frequently clip through the terrain. Nice animations and music though.

What Browser are you using ?

Extremely cool atmosphere created in this demo. In the deeper waters, I was really held in suspense, waiting for the music to turn ominous and a sea monster to eat me, but alas it didn't happen.

Minor feedback, it seemed like the instructions would disappear before I had a chance to read them...maybe just me. Quick enough to figure out though.

Even though it might have been already showcased some time ago I haven't seen it yet. It's beautiful. I especially like the reflective water. Parallax effect in the diving mode is also a nice touch adding some extra depth.

Have any of you tried running it on iPhone 5? I wonder if there were any performance issues (if it worked at all!;).

Another great thing about this demo is the movement of water, it always move in opposite direction of boat's movement which gives the feel that we are sailing in another boat with camera parallel to boy :)

There is a trick running the web browser on an iPhone with WebGL enabled using testflightapp. We hope that Apple will enable WebGL as a default soon. Basically the technology is all there...

If jailbroken, you can enable WebGL with the Enable WebGL tweak (free).

For what it's worth, it works really nicely on the iPhone 5 in Chrome with this enabled.

On both Firefox and Chrome on Mac OS X (10.6.8), the water itself flickers quite badly, despite a smooth framerate.

What versions? No problems for me. Firefox v24 and Chrome 29.0.1514.0 canary.

The current release versions of Chrome (27) and Firefox (21). Both auto-updated. Since the flicker is the same in different browsers, it may be more of an OS or graphics driver thing.

We have many guys working on the demos using MacOS. So I agree that it sounds like a driver thing. What graphics card are you using ?

I hadn't seen WebGL look so pretty and fluid, if they can create a whole game like this, it might be a pretty viable platform.

The link in the upper right corner gives a Drupal PDOException error, though.

Yes, it seems the server was not expecting this kind of attention. Should be fixed now.

Butter smooth and so atmospheric graphics, especially the rowing part

Very smooth on this side too (Chrome 26 on OS X). The graphics looks a bit jagged. Is that a WebGL restriction or is it the demo itself? I am not very familiar with WebGL.

demo.

Curiously I get this message in both Chrome 27 and 29 on OS X:

Whoopsie daisy! Your browser doesn't seem to support HTML5 and WebGL. The best thing to do is upgrade to a modern browser that supports all the awesome things the web has to offer.

You may have to toggle the webgl flag on Chrome on OSX.

"Check in chrome://flags and see if "Disable WebGL" flag has been set. Also, take a peek at chrome://gpu and see if it's showing any messages indicating why WebGL may be disabled."

-- from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15141974/does-webgl-work-...

I see a lot of jitter on a very fast Mac. (Safari 6.0.4).

Somebody who understands Web GL tell me -- developer's fault or browser's fault? It looks a little like numerical instability to me rather than a framerate issue per se, but I'm no 3D expert.

http://jsbench.s3.amazonaws.com/jitter.m4v

What's it like on Chrome? Sometimes these things can be an issue with the GC.

It is my understanding that Safari is a bit behind on the WebGL front. Could you try it with Chrome ?

Pretty impressive. Too bad it doesn't have collision detection yet. I love the reflection!

Another step closer...to console games on the browser.

Collision detection works on the crates underwater. Not sure why they didn't use it on the floating crates.

Smooth as silk, Firefox v24 (Nightly). I'm seeing approx 60FPS with no visible CPU/GPU load. Wonderful! :D

Doesn't work on the current release of Firefox though. Webkit/Chrome really is turning into the IE of this decade :P

Yep, getting TypeError: document.body is null in console in Firefox 21.0

Damn, this should work, we do support Firefox 21 ! It's probably a regression in the demo itself and not the engine. We'll fix it asap, thanks for the tip !

I get the same error on FF Nightly (24).

Ok, try reloading the page. We use requirejs but not the domready! plugin. So there seems to be a race condition with the body loading. Sorry for that, we'll fix it asap.

I tried again now, still getting the same error.

... but now it worked.

works nicely on Nexus 4 in chrome :)

In Chrome on my One X, it says the browser isn't supported. Works well with Firefox Aurora, though the graphics are noticeably worse than running it on a desktop browser.

Wow. Awesome graphics for the web!

Beautiful.

Doesn't load at all for me. I can load other WebGL demos on this browser, just not this one.

Sounds like you have Firefox, we currently have an issue on FF21. Please give it another go early next week.

Right. FF21 on Linux. I will.

>Your browser doesn't seem to support HTML5 and WebGL. The best thing to do is upgrade to a modern browser that supports all the awesome things the web has to offer.

I am on the latest version of Opera which I guess is not a modern browser. Perhaps turning down the condescension a notch and changing that "Upgrade" message to "Best works in Chrome" will be a good move. You're a second class citizen on HN if you use anything but Chrome.

I don't read much/any condescension in that message. Fair enough if you enjoy to use Opera, but why not have Chrome installed on your machine too so you can spin it up and view content like this when needed?

Also Mozilla as these two browser are far better than Opera and IE, its good to have multiple browser installed in system for experiments and trial

Weirdly enough, I'm getting the same message on Chrome Version 27.0.1453.93.

It's likely your graphics card/drivers. Type about:gpu in your address bar.

I was pleasantly surprised it worked in Opera for me (I usually get "fuck you, chrome 4ever" banners too).

Check opera:config if you have WebGL enabled and opera:gpu if your graphics card drivers aren't blacklisted for being insecure or buggy.

You are right, we tried to take a jab at Internet Explorer but forgot about Opera along the way. It's our job to make our engine and demos work on all WebGL enabled browsers and respect all browser vendors who help pave the way for great web technologies like WebGL. We failed and make it sound like it the browsers fault. I will discuss the wording with the team. Thanks for the feedback !

To the complainers and criticizers here: shut up, this is great.

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