I tried to run it in Firefox 4.0 and Chrome 10.0.648.204, but in both cases it returned an alert with the message, "This website requires WebGL. Try running Chrome 9+ or Firefox 4+".
This is why we should be checking for capabilities/features and not version. And part of this is reporting the correct, helpful error message when the capability isn't there, and not just say they have the wrong version.
I still have this problem with 64 bit flash on Linux, which adobe has decided to use a different format version string for.
Performance is heavily bound by the GPU on my system - Chrome goes from sucking up 60% of my CPU down to just 7% when I launch the demo(OK, I've got crappy Intel integrated graphics, but still). I consider that to be a good demonstration that JavaScript performance is now capable of driving detailed 3D scenes.
Looks really cool! Not having much experience with oceans, it's a little weird to see the jellyfish swimming sideways; I'm assuming they mostly swim "up"?
:) I was assuming sort of an up-and-sideways kind of up, and maybe they sink down when they hit the top and go up-and-sideways again. Jellyfish just don't seem like the right-angles-to-the-surface sort of swimmers to me, but like I say, I have no experience with jellyfish, not even seeing them on nature shows.
Which I can argue is pretty good for beta software, with very little heavy commercial use driving performance down. I also highly doubt the chrome/firefox team has enough resources allocated to truly make webgl a high performance thing yet. Regardless this is still faster then using canvas directly.
Don't go to a movie theater. They call it "moving pictures" when they sell you the ticket, but it is only 24 frames per second, and the individual frames don't move. Bogus.
In addition, human eye can detect flicker better in a bright room, vs a dark one. That's why movies can get away with 24 fps, and not something higher.
That said, you don't need 60fps to enjoy what you're watching unless you're playing games.
This is not very optimized app. There is a lot of overdraw for the volumetric effect and jellyfish transparency which kills the performance most of all. Also, animations are done in vertex shader on a high poly geometry and the shader itself could be much more efficient in doing that.
Im sure you cant run Crysis 2 in WebGL but you can still squeeze out a lot of performance out of it. Im excited to see what other people are going to make with it.
Honestly, this is the first time I've ever caught myself saying "Wow!" out-loud when visiting a website.
But, I think there is some issue with the framerate reporting. It was indicating between 40 and 60fps on my machine, but performance was fairly choppy.
Using Chrome 11.0.696.50 beta here. It took a while to setup in that I got a partial skybox and a few jellyfish popping up and then a few more and then a few more after that. I thought the camera or scene was changing because it was so jarring. Once setup though, it works pretty well.
I get 8-9fps with the default settings. Reducing the count of Jellyfish to 5 gave me closer to 20fps. Reducing it to 1 and turning off Skybox and Particles gave me about 40fps, but didn't look nearly as cool.
Surprisingly it works fine in Ubuntu with Chrome 10. I'm glad Chrome development progresses on Linux evenly with Mac and Windows as compared to Skype which lags behind.
With Skype, Windows is in the lead, with Mac trailing a ways behind, and Linux even further behind. Though with the reception of the latest Skype version for Mac, maybe it's a good thing that Linux is lagging behind.
You can check the author's blog, he has a few videos on how he made it, in particular one where he uses a kinect interface:
http://blog.aleksandarrodic.com/?p=60
I'm running firefox 4 (linux ubuntu 64bit) and it works fine.
