Slashdot Mirror

It works for me, although you need to use the non-standard namespace because it currently only implements a draft (Firefox 3.6).

What might this namespace be called, so that I can Google it? I tried Google searches for firefox 3.6 webgl and firefox 3.6 webgl namespace but neither appeared to produce relevant results.

It's in the WebKit nightly builds.

This page, last updated a week ago, states that that only Snow Leopard supports this version of WebKit. Users of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) aren't likely to buy a copy of 10.6 (Snow Leopard) just to see your site.

I'm guessing that in the short run, WebGL apps will have to use a layer written in JavaScript that implements a subset of WebGL in terms of the 2D canvas, doing all the T&L in script, using various tricks with the transformation matrix to get triangles to draw, and accepting gaps between triangles, induced by browsers' coverage-based antialiasing, as a cost of doing business.

http://tulrich.com/tectrixvr/

It seems that you don't know what GNASH is!

If I am right, GNASH is a GNU Flash player under GPL, whose base is gameswf, which was originally created for the interface of a game on XBOX.

I mainly know gameswf for having worked with it, it is nice and very promising, but lacked some important functions and need (in my opinion) a code redesign.

A game engine usually means a complete feature set - display (scene), audio, networking, etc. A scene graph is essentially a set of objects describing part or all of a scene. Usually they're grouped by similar properties - for instance, you might have a terrain scene graph and entity scene graphs.

My first thought was that OSG uses Demeter for a terrain engine, and Demeter is a ROAM based (or possibly SOAR? I forget) engine that is software optimized and doesn't work well with hardware. It appears that at some point, however, that the Demeter part of OSG was updated to include this guy's chunked level of detail algorithm, which as far as I can tell is a T&L capable adaptation of ROAM.

My last serious look at OSG was several years ago and I was disappointed with its overall speed when I combined a scene with terrain. It's possible other optimizations have helped, as well. I still hate the Crystal Space API, but development in the past couple of years has done wonders to performance, so maybe the same has happened with OSG.

Laszlo used to cost about ten thousand dollars per license, but it is now fully open source and free. Flex costs more than ten thousand dollars per server license, and has restrictions on how you can modify and redistribute Flex components.

Macromedia has a spotty track record supporting their server software over the long haul, and now that Adobe's bought them, Flex is in Flux. Laszlo is here to stay because it's available now, free and open source, and you're not restricted in how you can modify and reuse Laszlo and its components.

Flex is a lot like Laszlo, because Flex is Macromedia's imitation of Laszlo, but Flex is intended to lock you into Flash instead of giving you independence from it.

The most important difference between Laszlo and Flex, is that Laszlo is not tied to Flash, it "just happens to" use it right now, because that's the most practical target platform at this point in history. Laszlo is a high level JavaScript/XML based language which currently targets the Flash player as its initial platform, with more to come.

Laszlo abstracts away Flash dependencies, so it will target other runtimes than Flash in the future, as they mature and shake out: Java (Rhino/Java2D), C# (CLR, GDI+, Avalon), C++ (SpiderMonkey, CGI+, Quartz, Cairo, AGL), SVG (Adobe, Batik, Firefox), DHTML (web browsers, JavaScript, AJAX).

But right now Flash rules, and Laszlo is the best way to develop rich web applications that run on Flash.

One really interesting possible target platform for Laslo is an open source Flash player, that can easily be integrated into applications and games, and uses OpenGL with hardware accellerated rendering.

-Don

I'm an author of gameswf, a Public Domain SWF player library (for use in 3D accelerated game engines, not browsing the web). In my opinion based on working with it heavily, the SWF format and supporting software is sweet stuff. It's damn tight and focused on things that are useful to visual designers, but still amazingly capable. Nevertheless, calling SWF an "open standard" is disingenuous.

SWF is, in practice, no more open than MS Word DOC. Macromedia publishes a spec, but unfortunately it's not useful for writing software to interpret SWF, due to legal restraints. My own library has had to rely on a lot of sweat and reverse engineering and help from others, and has still only managed to achieve a subset of SWF compatibility.

Read the license on the Macromedia spec, it comes with many strings attached. For example:

...a nonexclusive license to use the Specification for the sole purposes of developing Products that output SWF.

I.e. they don't allow you to use the spec to implement a player!

Macromedia does some cool stuff and employs some cool people, but the same company engages in heavy-handed corporate scheming. I don't think that's immoral or anything; corporations need to make money somehow. But people need to see the warm-and-fuzzy "open" bullshit for what it is: a convenient marketing story.

BTW the only truly open SWF specs are reverse-engineered ones. The best one is Alexis' SWF Reference

You think so? I doubt very much Thatcher Ulrich would code a new crappy engine, when he could use his famous (at least among those who keep up with such things) Chunked LOD algorithm. Thatcher released a sample implementation a while ago on sourceforge with source for linux and windows.

The chunked LOD algo is capable of using HUGE datasets (eg 285MB in the demo). Unlikely then that he's doing a "render the entire blah blah" thing...

You obviously know very little about graphics programming and more importantly have spent zero time investigating your claims.

Fair enough if you don't like the screen shots, but you really can't put down the engine, or it's programmer. Thatcher Ulrich is one of very few professional game programmers who publishes (both source and papers) his CURRENT algorithms (eg not 5 year old ones like Carmack). He invented the (also famous among people who know) "loose octree" method of spacial partitioning.

Sorry - here is the Wiki site for the VR exercise bike. Unfortunately, it was produced bt Tectrix, bought by Cybex and then canned. Oh it also had a fan that would blow in your face as you started going faster.