Mozilla Develops Gladius 3D Game Engine

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."

Comments

Re:Oh goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

cool

[mewsenews]

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

Re:cool

[Tridus]

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.

Re:There's no stinking fox

[nzac]

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.

Re:Insensitive clods

[keitosama]

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

Re:Plugins are the best at this time

[Billly Gates]

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.

time to switch

[Tom]

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. :-(