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DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games
arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."
WebGL can't use DirectX which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering. I'm partly playing Devil's Advocate here as I'd love to see purely Free Software solutions, but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though.
On the subject of plugins, amen to that, but I don't think it will play out that way. OS, applications and browser will increasingly merge, I think. We wont give up on plugins so much as the concept becomes increasingly ill-fitting. Time was when I would be downloading all sorts of programs to carry out my work, these days anything that can be is becoming a web app, and what "can be" is becoming a broader definition every year.
Mind you, in a few years time, there will be quad-core DDR3 machines all over the place, pretty much all your applications will be a horrible pile of javascript with a HTML renderer on top and someone will come up with the radical notion of creating downloadable binaries written in C++ and the world will be revolutionized by the amazing speed and power of it - and we'll come full circle.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I googled for any WebGL demo I could find, tried couple and.. they don't work.
"doesn't require any plugins", eh?
"click here for instructions how to enable webgl in firefox" -> "you need latest nightly build blah blah".
Where's the damn difference between requiring plugin and requiring something that user need to download and install anyway?
It wasn't FUD, it was a genuine question. But it seems unwelcome questions just get modded as Flamebait and Troll around here. Besides which, I said DirectX, not D3D. DirectX has a lot of features that OpenGL doesn't as I understand it. Are you saying this is not the case? Sorry - that's another question which probably means I deserve more Flamebait and Troll mods. Clearly only absolute certainty suits the Slashdot mods.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.