WinXP: Fine in Chrome, but in Firefox (23/25) on my machine there's a flickering massacre when scrolling [0]. Maybe it's sth with my GPU drivers though (but then it's weird that in Chrome it's ok).
What GPU? Modern drivers? That's definitely a driver mess, pretty hard to cause something like that to happen if you're just feeding WebGL buffers to the driver...
There's potential, sure, but at the same time, animations like this don't come cheap - it takes a lot of knowledge, time, effort, and artistic insight to build something like that, which is a rare combination in any one person. But mostly time, and time equals money, and money is something a lot of people-facing companies aren't willing to pay for visuals like these.
Even if the could, that is. I can see gaming companies investing in visuals like this to enhance their game's web pages, or even delegate parts of the game's UI to a browser. Battlefield 3 (and probably 4) does this for its server browser, removing the need for a large chunk of UI from its game, and removing the need to update the whole game in a patch if they want to make changes to their server browser. No fancy 3D effects or animations in there though. At least, not yet. iirc, they've outsourced development of that server browser to a third party.
Seconding Miyamoto's question. Is there a use case for mixing 3D graphics and HTML, as opposed to showing 3D graphics in a box on the page? I don't count "making fancy website intros" as a very important use case, because everyone hated such intros the last time around.
Definitely! This is really just a demo, so I can see how people are complaining that it "doesn't really do anything." But that shows such a startling lack of vision and imagination. We are supposed to see the potential in new tech and then push it further. Or at least, that's how I see myself. Cranks and nay-sayers have no business in this industry, in my not-so-humble opinion.
HTML was originally a document, but today we've stretched it to do so much. And that's great! There's no need to draw a line around fancy webgl stuff. Your whole page can twist and flow and sparkle and whatever. You can make styling prettier sure but also make you content deeper. It will take time work out the kinks but hey, it's an adventure! That's pretty cool! Boring is never good. And there will be those with poor taste no matter the medium. This isn't a fad and it isn't superficial. This can totally change our experience on the web. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of such cool stuff?
This is an astonishing demo -- and I very nearly missed it, because I thought the scrolly graphic at the top was just a fancy animated header, followed by a bunch of text that seemed to be refering to something else. I only discovered the full demo when I accidentally scrolled up, and found it lurking there well above the start-point for the page. I can't help but think that a lot of other viewers must be missing it entirely.
So a note to web-masters: please put any content you want your users to see below the top of the page, not above it.
Yes, the demo was not obvious until I scrolled back to the top. It is beautiful, and I'm sure it took a lot of hard work. After trying it both FF and Chrome, it's frustrating that a 3 year old machine with a decent dedicated Radeon 4670 GPU, can't run such a simple demo at full 60 FPS.
As cool as it is, am I the only one that thinks the "web penalty" is ridiculous? From Crysis to StarCraft, I can play most new games no problem, but not a simple web demo like this.
That's interesting, I run it on Pentium G860 with Radeon 7770 (so current hardware but pretty low-end) and had butter-smooth 60fps with Firefox 23, Windows 7, CPU usage ~15%, GPU usage ~5%.
Perhaps you could check if your hardware acceleration in Firefox is enabled (about:support)? Try webgl.force-enabled in about:config as well.
What's ridiculous is that we're fawning over something we've always been able to do, just because it's now done over the hundreds of useless layers of indirection that the web imposes.
There are so many impressive things going on here. The starting animation. Ambient occlusion. Integrating CSS 3D and WebGL. Even the achievements.
Notice he scales down the resolution when there are several frames dropping below 45 FPS. I've been thinking about how to solve the performance problem in voodoo.js, and this could be it. Good stuff.
Dynamically rendering at a lower resolution and then upscaling it to get a consistent 60fps is such a cool technique. The first example I ever saw of using a dynamic frame buffer in that way came in the form of WipEout HD on the PS3 back in 2008 or so[1], totally blew me away.
It feels like there aren't as many people doing interesting things and exploring new ideas on the web anymore but maybe I just don't know where to look.
Well, I don't know what browsers you guys are using, but on my laptop running linux and firefox 22 with an Intel Core2 Duo, my browser became completely unresponsive for some seconds and then only responded extremely jerkily until I closed the tab.
I just hope this practise doesn't spread outside of artsy demos.
On FF 23 on OS X, my quad-proc Core i7 is barely whirring the CPUs at all. Granted, this laptop does have a real GPU which I seriously doubt is the case for your C2D system.
96 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadThe "cheater" achievement was a surprise.
The story of my development career.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/LYUINSc.jpg
Even if the could, that is. I can see gaming companies investing in visuals like this to enhance their game's web pages, or even delegate parts of the game's UI to a browser. Battlefield 3 (and probably 4) does this for its server browser, removing the need for a large chunk of UI from its game, and removing the need to update the whole game in a patch if they want to make changes to their server browser. No fancy 3D effects or animations in there though. At least, not yet. iirc, they've outsourced development of that server browser to a third party.
HTML was originally a document, but today we've stretched it to do so much. And that's great! There's no need to draw a line around fancy webgl stuff. Your whole page can twist and flow and sparkle and whatever. You can make styling prettier sure but also make you content deeper. It will take time work out the kinks but hey, it's an adventure! That's pretty cool! Boring is never good. And there will be those with poor taste no matter the medium. This isn't a fad and it isn't superficial. This can totally change our experience on the web. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of such cool stuff?
So a note to web-masters: please put any content you want your users to see below the top of the page, not above it.
Though even once you see it, easy to miss is the "settings" cog in the top right. EGA mode!
Little badge popped up on the bottom of the screen: Achievement Unlocked - All Glory to the Hypnotoad
Also reload the page with the javascript console on.
As cool as it is, am I the only one that thinks the "web penalty" is ridiculous? From Crysis to StarCraft, I can play most new games no problem, but not a simple web demo like this.
"The computer revolution hasn't happened yet"...
So the rewrite simply added a cool multiplier.
Notice he scales down the resolution when there are several frames dropping below 45 FPS. I've been thinking about how to solve the performance problem in voodoo.js, and this could be it. Good stuff.
[1]: http://insidethedigitalfoundry.blogspot.com.au/2008/09/wipeo...
It feels like there aren't as many people doing interesting things and exploring new ideas on the web anymore but maybe I just don't know where to look.
I just hope this practise doesn't spread outside of artsy demos.