It's almost completely unreadable on my Android phone. The character shapes are mostly there, but the triangles overlap in weird ways, like vertex order might be wrong it something.
This discussion reminds me times 4 years ago, when I showed my WebGL games to my firends and instead of getting an interesting feedback, 90% of comments were about my games not working on their devices. Sad to see the same thing in 2016 :(
New technology is always full of naysayers and people pointing out the obvious defects. Real innovation comes from recognizing and realizing the potential of it.
Oddly, my machines really did creak with WebGL, but it appears as if they have been improving in performance. It's probably not graphic drivers as this ubuntu laptop hasn't had a new graphics driver since 2013. It must be the browsers improving performance. Anyone else noticed WebGL working better these days on the same hardware?
I work on the renderer for a product that uses WebGL (I won't link to it because I don't want to sound like a shill, but it's a web based 3d modeler called FormIt).
Unfortunately, I think webgl performance has actually been getting much worse on Chrome. (Firefox has been fine).
WebGL is pretty exciting in what it makes possible, but it's based on the OpenGL ES2 spec from 2007 which is way out of date at this point, so the surface area of the hardware you can actually use is really limited, and various aspects of javascript lead to some really ugly performance compromises. This is partially why I'm pretty excited about web assembly -- I don't think it'll fix everything off the bat, but not having to go through javascript could be a really big win.
What would improve it is when you zoom, with the mouse wheel or gesture if it would zoom in on the mouse cursor point rather than at the centre of the screen.
I really like this demo, but it reliably crashes a mid 2012 macbook pro with lion, both on firefox and safari (the older version of the demo was the same).
Now, reading the other comments, i wonder if there are any tools that help with diagnosing device capabilities?
I don't have high hopes of integrating anything WebGL related in my projects due to these problems, so how can you make sure that WebGL code will work across devices?
Edit: How can you make sure you notice when it's not working?
I just wish these web readers implemented control+f find feature, because this is the most useful thing for me and a lot of people. To be able to search entire books for a string of text is so useful.
interesting technique but it's extremely slow on Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB (and so I assume other machines). Like when zoomed in it's under 2fps whereas I suspect the built in chrome text renderer can do that much faster (generating texture glyphs of the needed characters at the desired res and then rendering them). I'm curious why drawing less characters (like 5 giant characters) runs at 2fps. Is the shader that heavy?
29 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadChrome 47.0.2526.73 (64 Bit) Linux
What was the issue?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvutftylbj77d8r/Screenshot_2016-01...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3qn9h5pgw2p671/Screenshot_2016-01...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4h93ycueykrjai/Screenshot_2016-01...
Doesn't work on iPad - just get blank pages.
Why not a png ?
Edit: So after a quick test:
* glyphs.bmp 53.5 MB
* glyphs.png 7.6 MB
I guess it could be shrinked even more.
LZMA and Bzip2 both get it down to about 3 MB but I'd need to use a javascript decompressor.
Unfortunately, I think webgl performance has actually been getting much worse on Chrome. (Firefox has been fine).
WebGL is pretty exciting in what it makes possible, but it's based on the OpenGL ES2 spec from 2007 which is way out of date at this point, so the surface area of the hardware you can actually use is really limited, and various aspects of javascript lead to some really ugly performance compromises. This is partially why I'm pretty excited about web assembly -- I don't think it'll fix everything off the bat, but not having to go through javascript could be a really big win.
Ubuntu Gnome, AMD open source driver
You simply render your text as images and then apply the method already used by the image viewers.
What would improve it is when you zoom, with the mouse wheel or gesture if it would zoom in on the mouse cursor point rather than at the centre of the screen.
Now, reading the other comments, i wonder if there are any tools that help with diagnosing device capabilities? I don't have high hopes of integrating anything WebGL related in my projects due to these problems, so how can you make sure that WebGL code will work across devices?
Edit: How can you make sure you notice when it's not working?
I just wish these web readers implemented control+f find feature, because this is the most useful thing for me and a lot of people. To be able to search entire books for a string of text is so useful.