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Firefox 3D Canvas FPS Engine
axonis writes "Benjamin Joffe has developed Canvascape - "3D Walker", a simple javascript browser based 3D first person game engine that shows off the capabilities of the Canvas tag found in Firefox, Safari and Opera. " Don't expect much except a proof of concept ;)
would it be as portable as it is now?
..he had used Java and hadn't resorted to a non-W3C-standard (but WHATWG) tag, I might have considered that interesting. Check this guy's work out: http://www.brackeen.com/
Last I checked, Safari is KHTML, not Gecko, therefore the "underlying structure" wouldn't be the same.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Not in HTML4, nor in XHTML1.0 or 1.1
Canvas is a semi-proprietary element (originates from Apple, who first implemented it for Dashboard) that currently is in the under development HTML5/Web Applications 1.0 standard from WHATWG, but is (as far as I know) not part of the W3C's XHTML2 draft
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
support for this sort of stuff seems like bloat to me. i mean wasn't the whole idea behind firefox to get away from the "hey let's jam everything we can possibly think of into one browser app" idea that was bogging down mozilla?
all the code neccesary to support this canvas thing (which will probably rarely be used) is just more junk that will slow down legit bug fixes, and probably be RIFE with security holes.
firefox will eventually just turn into 'Mozilla NG', and become yet another bloated turd of a browser, given the direction that 1.5 is taking, IMO.
this 'web app' support should be a sandboxed plugin, or something else that can be -optionally- added on, for firefox, not built directly into it.
Two points:
1) that may well fall under fair use
2) so he gets a C&D letter, instructing him to remove the offending content... which he's planning on doing anyway. Net result, the company pays some lawyers needlessly.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
And so Java3d takes yet another hit. It's always interesting and amazing to me that games in web browsers using things like java3d never really took off. It's probably all due to the loading times, and the ammount of content you'd have to send via http. I mean, look at modern games, one of the huge differneces is the ammount of memory modern video cards have for textures, hundreds of megabytes of textures. Could you imagine having to put that kind of strain on a webserver? It would simply be imposssible! While certainly neat, this will likely become an novelty. Even for things like demonstrations on websites of products, there's flash out there. But, i digress, yet another thing you can do via javascript hacks. Bravo! let the interoperability headaches abound....
I was just looking at the api and this has applications outside games. Think graphics programs; of course, nothing like Photoshop, but enough to allow doing images in a browser. Why use Dia as a standalone app when you can have a collaborative version in a browser?
It's coming..
so you're recycling jokes from digg?
Will there be a support for canvas in IE7?
I think it will be a big factor to think about when thinkin about using canvas in some web app. Because noone will want to use it if only a handful of browsers can support it.
This is a "Firefox 3D Canvas FPS Engine" just because it works in Firefox (As well as Safari and Opera)? Edit you damn editors!
It also depends though on what you are optimizing for.
Having worked in Fortran, I can tell you that some things are just not possible to optimize well in Fortran either. And although I will admit that it is possible my knowledge of Fortran could be outdates (is there any other kind?) I suspect that you still have issues with optimizing for certain things (such as executables of sane sizes when dealing with huge arrays).
Again, I have friends who work as programmers in scientific fields who have complained about the overhead of Java in things like genetics analysis apps. On both the Fortran and Java the problem is not how fast can you pass X benchmark but rather how fast will your program work on a data set of arbitrary size.
Indeed Fortran makes this requirement next to impossible for the very fact that all memory allocation is done at *compile time* in Fortran 77, and in Fortran 90, you still extremely inflexible and this is what allows certain optimizations to take place.
Secondly, these posts only deal with pointer optimizations. They *do not* deal with the question of whether a given application will be faster than another one, especially in cases where many of the cycles are run through routines which don't involve user defined pointers. There is a very real question whether in memory or processor intensive applications whether these pointer optimizations will create a *net* gain of speed. For example, lets say in Fortran 77, I use a static array that is large enough to take up most of memory because this is the maximum size I *may* need for my application. At least with Fortran 77, this executable will be *big* and take time to load that could be better used actually running the program. Secondly, what happens when I also need to run another app on that same system? What is going to get swapped to disk? How is that going to impact performance? How does the kernel scheduling affect things?
Now supposed I write the same app in ANSI C using malloc and free where appropraite. The executable will load faster and *only use the memory it needs.* This means less swapping, and fewer delays due to outside factors.
In Fortran 90, things get somewhat better. I can create an array and then allocate space to it. But complex data structures are still lacking and so certain types of problems are going to get semantically *ugly* in Fortran 90. Ugly semantics makes for slow programs.
Here is the thing. There is no "perfect language." Fortran excells at allowing science students to rapidly develop quick and dirty programs to solve science problems safely (no buffer overruns, etc). These simulations, provided that they meet certain criteria, will probably run faster in Fortran than in any other language. But I don't think you can generalize this to an idea that "Fortran is faster than C" because in many cases, it won't be (many of these cases are corner cases in Fortran's core market though).
As for Java... It is great at some things. But there are many other areas where it simply doesn't perform well. Again processor and memory intensive apps (especially those involving string processing) come to mind. Java excells at being able to offer closed source software vendors a compiled environment with the portability of a scripting langauge. If performance continues to improve, great, but I don't think that performance will ever be the reason to choose Java, unless it is being compared to the likes of Python. Is it possible to determine circumstances where it may perform better than C, C++, or insert language here? Sure, but can one say that this means that Java is on a par performance wise with these languages? I don't think so.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Fair Use" is more of a right than a law.
Such as reading a bedtime story from a book to your children is not a "Performance"; copying a vinyl record to cassette tape for use while jogging (those wearable 45's skip too much) is not "Piracy"; recording a TV show on your Betamax deck is not "Theft" (unless you fast forward through the commercials).
Fair Use shouldn't need to be specifically defined in the written law, but I'm sure many clarifications can be found in case law.
I would guess that since his use is not a review, parody, tribute or other protected use, and it's being knowingly publicly distributed in a form that could be construed as competing with Farcry, he would be eligible to be sued (for triple damages I think), but hopefully the makers of Farcry arn't total jerks.