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.
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).
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 !
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.
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.
>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?
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 !