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Mozilla Develops Gladius 3D Game Engine

Posted by Soulskill on from the new-versions-every-six-hours dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla is developing its own 3D engine called Gladius as part of a wider Paladin project whose aim it is to bring 3D to the web. As all programmers know, the best way to learn is to experiment, and that's exactly what Mozilla is doing. In order to develop Gladius the team decided to create a game called RescueFox (best played in Firefox). It's a very basic prototype, and Mozilla has no interest in taking it further, but the purpose it served was to highlight what still needs to be done to make Gladius a solid web browser 3D engine solution."

16 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh goodie... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just what we need... an annoying technology that manufacturers can use to try to convince us to "upgrade" all of our laptops and monitors.

    Yeah, I wish there were more stories on Slashdot about how to live in harmony with nature away from all the trappings of modern society. I don't come here for all this news about "upgrades" and "technology" and stuff.

  2. I cannot wait.. by will_die · · Score: 2

    I wonder what projects pila, pugio and plumbatae will be.

  3. There's no stinking fox by Saija · · Score: 2

    That page only shows empty, ahem, space...

    --
    Slashdot ya no es que lo era! ;)
    1. Re:There's no stinking fox by nzac · · Score: 3, Informative

      Disable noscript... (nothing came up before I did that)

      Its a tech demo still pretty cool though.
      Find the fox and double click on it to win.

    2. Re:There's no stinking fox by Waccoon · · Score: 2

      Welcome to the future of the Internet. A bold, dynamic, exciting frontier where if you don't have the latest browser technology, you'll get a blank page. I'm reliving the years of looking at a spinning hourglass for minutes at a time and wondering if the computer will ever actually do anything.

      Seriously, even for a tech demo, why isn't there some kind of notification that your browser can't handle the demo? Couldn't they print a placeholder what the demo is and what is required, and then erase the message once the demo code kicks in? This gives a really bad impression if you ask me, and that is not what a demo is supposed to do.

      Fail.

  4. cool by mewsenews · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this is definitely what mozilla needs rather than a stable release cycle and MSI packages for enterprise

    1. Re:cool by Tridus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Pfft. Stability? Easy deployability? Who needs that stuff? Mozilla's target audience isn't the enterprise or the home. It's a magical land of make believe.

      --
      -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
  5. Re:Insensitive clods by keitosama · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is about making a game engine to ease development with WebGL, not the shit-flying-in-your-face kind of 3D.

  6. Re:Plugins are the best at this time by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Have you seen the Firefox demo's when Firefox 4 came out? All 3D rendered with webgl. Accelerated html 5 is coming and has many uses. I already see the HP add in 3D on slashdot if I use Firefox or IE 9. It is not in Chrome yet as the canvas is not accelerated by default yet.

    With decent integrated GPUs that actually do not suck in AMDs and now Intels latest offerings it is certainly doable and coming. MS has demos including a game of scrabble. Mostly 3D is for games, children love Flash games these days and that is turning to HTML 5 as I type this.

    In 2 years it will be quite mainstream. My guess is even less. Browsers are being updated very quickly now and even IE now has an annual update. Since IE follows standards in the later releases, many businesses can upgrade with ease annually once their crappy IE 6 intranet sites are updated.

    True World of Warcraft in HTML 5 with CSS 3D is not going to happen anytime soon, but many games already do advanced mmos in javascript that are impressive. We will see but my guess is it will be here sooner than you think.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  7. I welcome this effort ... by BeforeCoffee · · Score: 2

    Speed the death of Flash and speed the adoption of HTML5+JS as the goto client-side software development platform for most things. The Joystick API is amongst the greatest things coming out of this effort:

    https://wiki.mozilla.org/JoystickAPI

    Mozilla is doing good stuff here, buck up ppl!

  8. Prototype... by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

    It's a very basic prototype, and Mozilla has no interest in taking it further, but the purpose it served was to highlight what still needs to be done to make Gladius a solid web browser 3D engine solution.

    From history, the most successful game engines are those which are written first for a specific game that is sold (Quake and Unreal are two prominent examples, but there are many more). Which makes sense - how else do you find out what a real game needs? I'm not sure a simplistic prototype is going to cut it here...

  9. time to switch by Tom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Between the version number / release cycle insanity and this, I think it's finally time to switch. What a shame, I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. But the update today broke another extension, and building 3D into the browser is a sign of insanity that I thought we had wiped out with the demise of VMRL.

    Dear Mozilla developers: If it's not something the majority of your users are going to actually use, it belongs into an extension or a plugin. Also, there are already several 3D engines with Firefox plugins, with years of experience in the field, because you don't build a good engine in a lazy summer. So with all due respect, what the fuck are you thinking?

    I'm afraid you've fallen into the way-too-common bloatware trap: Not realizing when your product is feature complete and what it needs is polishing, not more stuff bolted on. There's enough CSS3 and HTML5 support still missing, for example.

    Time to take a serious look at Chrome. :-(

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    1. Re:time to switch by Goaway · · Score: 2

      Did you get this far down the thread without already noticing that Slashdot is dumb as toast nowadays? Nobody posting in this thread has even the tiniest sliver of a clue what they are talking about.

    2. Re:time to switch by Waccoon · · Score: 2

      Time to take a serious look at Chrome.

      At least consider Iron, where the full source is available and it doesn't force you to have Google Update and its friends.

      First time I tried Chrome, it read 20GB and wrote 4GB of data. I don't know what it was doing, but it sure looks suspicious to me, and I'm not too thrilled that every cold start of the browser unnecessarily tortures my SSD.

    3. Re:time to switch by bgarcia · · Score: 2
      Iron was basically a joke for the paranoid:

      Is Iron a Scam? Yes

      The article title appears to be too harsh, but basically somebody compared the Iron source code to the Chromium source code and found that the only real changes were to disable 3 items that were already user-configurable within Chromium.

      Here's another article that suggests that the actual reason for the Iron fork was just to make money (using Google ads on their website) by taking advantage of peoples' fears about Google: The story of Iron

      So if you really are worried about Google, you should also worry about the misinformation being spread by the creators of Iron. If you want to have access to the full source, I suggest installing Chromium instead of Iron.

      --
      I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
    4. Re:time to switch by Waccoon · · Score: 2

      The primary reason for using Iron, despite "only 3 real changes" is the fact that the project is already built. Google makes it hard to get the official Chromium builds by repeatedly moving around the binaries. Do you see any binaries downloadable from the page you just linked? You have to hunt for them, and you have to do that every time you want to update. No thanks.

      Linux people may be thrilled to compile their own code, but most people just want to download it and go. To a lot of people, having a build that's very easy to install and update can be a major feature in itself.

      You might as well say that all Linux distros are the same because they generally all come with the same packages.

      Iron also comes pre-configured with a few extensions. They're minor, but nevertheless they are there. It's not about the code, it's the packaging.

      "The story of Iron"

      The general gyst of that article is that there is no need to make a fork because you could just modify a few lines yourself and get the same result. Well, why should I have to do it myself? Plus, the comments about contributing to Chromium and having the changes made "official" are completely stupid. Google is under no obligation to have just a few 3rd-party changes included into the official build.

      If you want to have access to the full source...

      Do forks really cause that much disdain within the open source community? Does a project really have to have hundreds of changes to justify an alternative build? I find it rather unfortunate that Iron gets so much hate from people because it's just not different enough from Chromium.

      Iron was basically a joke for the paranoid.

      Those paranoid of Chrome, yes. I'd just use Chromium if Google actually didn't make me jump through hoops to get it. So long as all the criticism for Iron revolves around it being "just a fork", rather than doing something really bad, I see no reason to call it a scam. The fact that someone actually made a diff and found nothing evil in the Iron source makes me feel even better about the project, so I'll continue using it as a backup browser to Firefox.

      Gee, I wonder what would happen if someone made a fork of Firefox and only changed the config file so the GUI behaved like 3.6 again. Would people slam it as a scam, or herald it as a major convenience?

      Sometimes, I feel that the open source community is just a bit too egotistical to remember what open source is all about.