A WebGL game engine | Hacker News Reader

A WebGL game engine

github.com

62 pointsdionyziz41 comments

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That's a horrible readme.

That's a horrible comment.

Not really.

Agreed.

Last update 2 years ago ???

Is it a perfect Engine, that need no support, or did nobody use it.

JS...

Yes.. That is kind of crazy. Why is it all of a sudden on HN?

I am curious why is this engine noteworthy... three.js seems far more mature and advanced than this.

Any more details? Pics, docs or blogs describing what it does? Why did the startup fail?

this looks interesting, but i seem to be missing something... where is the data and toolchain?

I'm really not a fan of code driven 'game engines' I think it misses the point...

also, despite the code making for an interesting read (seeing how someone else approaches this problem) most of the demos don't work for me in chrome.

demos: http://files.nikcub.com/finalengine/

some work, some don't. i'm fixing them as I go.

That's awesome! The spaceship especially. I wonder if it's possible to make the turning radius smaller though. Going to poke around. Thanks for doing this!

Thanks for putting this together! :)

Here's a car driving demo we also left unfinished you might be interested in, written using this same engine: https://github.com/kamibu/kamiburace

Here are a couple more demos using the engine that we wrote. Some use a slightly older version of the engine, but they illustrate the things we imagined would be possible. I'm giving links to the actual demos.

Pool of water: http://vl.kamibu.com/cool/water/

Traveling in stone tunnel screen saver: http://vl.kamibu.com/cool/tunnel/

Bone animation (maybe the most impressive of the three): http://petros.kamibu.com/files/bone-animation/

Umm... not that familiar with WebGL, but i assume it comes packaged with the browser. So, why am i getting a blank screen in all three? When bone animation does render a black blank screen and some control instructions..

Some browsers don't support it yet. What is your browser version?

FireFox 25.0.1 :/

It could be a hardware issue too. My graphics card doesn't support it, even though my browser should.

I don't usually complain about this kind of thing (because someone else usually does it first), but the model for the third demo is absurdly sexualized (think the original Tomb Raider, except even more so, in higher detail). Is there any particular reason you picked that one? Can it be replaced? It's laughably juvenile, and just distracts from a really impressive tech demo.

It's silly to say that buxom woman is 'sexualized.' That's just prepubescent pedantry. I will say that it's interesting that neither the breasts or buttocks have any motion, they are 'bolted' down, which doesn't give a good impression of the frameworks' capabilities.

How, exactly, is it silly? Or prepubescent? (The concept of sexualization being prepubescent is a nearly oxymoronic postulate in the first place.) The model is altered in physically impossible ways purely to exaggerate its sexual characteristics, rather than being portrayed in realistic fashion. That's practically the definition of sexualization.

Does sexualization have absolutely no place? I don't think anyone would argue that. However, it is at best distracting, at worst harmful when it's used in inappropriate situations. There's no reason for a model in a tech demo to have (extremely) exaggerated sexual characteristics, and there are plenty of reasons not to - distraction from the main purpose, possibly making women feel alienated or objectified, and sparking off-topic discussions such as this one in a thread that should only have to discuss the game engine, to name a few.

If it were simply an attractive or buxom model, I'd have little or no problem - it's the blatant, extreme, and pointless sexualization (without going into detail, none of the sexual characteristics of the model are even close to possible in a real human being), that is the problem.

It's a tech demo that has a cartoony looking character walking around. It's not 'sexualized' at all. 'Woman' does not by default mean sexualized.

Are we even looking at the same model? It isn't just a model of a woman, or even a model of a sexy woman, it is a silly low-quality hypersexualized caricature of a woman.

I also generally feel that a lot of sexism-claims are overblown, but I don't think that the model used there would be appropriate in a workplace or for any serious sales pitch.

I don't usually complain about this kind of thing, but I'm gonna anyway...

So many folks here just enjoy announcing that their oh-so-delicate sensibilities have somehow been disturbed. Go outside, or turn up your TV if you really want stuff to be a petty bitch about.

Jesus hates you. Deal with it.

The stone tunnel could become a great game.

The player flies along the tunnel. They are faced with walls, and they need to mine / shoot past the walls. Some blocks in the wall are hard to get through, but score more. Some blocks in the wall are easier to get through, but score less. Occasionally some stones in the walls are power ups - rapid fire or explode the wall or slow the tunnel speed.

Sounds like a plan! Since it's open source, maybe you can give it a try :)

What's the pros of having Javascript game engine instead of converting existing C++ game engine using Emscripten?

You can hire cheaper developers.

I get the feeling it would cost more to hire developers who can wrap their heads around performance sensitivities in JavaScript and WebGL than it would to hire, say, C++ developers who've read the OGRE manual.

I believe hiring skilled JavaScript game programmer would be harder than hiring skilled C++ game programmer.

Nonexistent compile times and easier debugging, plus all the other generic reasons you may (or may not) have to choose JavaScript as a programming language.

The same pros that come with using a dynamic language vs. a statically typed one...

It doesn't seem most dynamic languages have huge benefit on large development project. Also, C++ has greater DSL options.

No but they have benefits for small developers. Really depends what you're looking for.

Looks great. Anyone know if WebGL is ever going to be released/enabled for mobile Safari?

Anywhere where we can demo it live?

Looks like there are example DIRs in there.

I guess clone to local then open index.html

"Last updated 2 years ago" Is it dead?

Yes! The original title of the post is "Our start-up failed and we open sourced it, too", but hackernews decided to edit my post title.

We started building a fully-fledged game, which failed. We subsequently decided to make the engine open source. We began working on this before other WebGL game engines became stable and popular like they are today.

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing!

not a single demo works for me ... white blank screen. Using Firefox

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