Tag Archives: WebGL

Call for com­pat­i­bil­ity testing

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16

It seems a cou­ple of peo­ple I have demon­strated my WIP WebGL-​​based 7drl have had trou­ble run­ning later ver­sions of it, so I decided to ask you guys to see if it works for you. The game is played inside a web browser and requires WebGL sup­port (but not any plu­g­ins), so you need a rather new browser (e.g. Google Chrome 10 or recent beta of Fire­fox 4 – IE won’t work). Also, your graph­ics card needs to be at least OpenGL 2 capa­ble (with decent dri­vers) for WebGL to work.

If all goes well, you should see a dun­geon where you can walk around with arrow/​WASD keys. On the other hand, if there is any error pop-​​ups or just a blank page or some­thing, some­thing has gone wrong. There could also be errors in the JavaScript con­sole (acces­si­ble in Chrome by Ctrl+Shift+J). In addi­tion to error mes­sages, I’d like to know what is your web browser brand and ver­sion as well as graph­ics card and driver.

Access game here

EDIT: Check out WebGL Wiki for browser sup­port help & notes.

Light in the dark

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4

I started my WebGL based 7drl roughly 10 hours ago and I think I’ve got­ten into a quite good start: I’ve got move­ment, basic col­li­sion detec­tion, level load­ing from an ascii map and basic light­ing with multi-​​light support.

Multi-light system
First day’s results: sim­ple dun­geon with lighting

I’ll prob­a­bly con­tinue by tweak­ing the shaders for pret­tier effects and try­ing to add ran­dom­ness to those bor­ing cube blocks.

WebGL is whis­per­ing to me from the shadows

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I men­tioned ear­lier that I am going to do a 7drl with C++ and OpenGL (prob­a­bly test­ing out Qt toolkit’s OpenGL mod­ule), but now WebGL, the JavaScript OpenGL ES bind­ings for use inside a web browser, has started to taunt me increas­ingly. I am no expert with JavaScript and I usu­ally pre­fer com­piled, sta­t­i­cally typed lan­guages for games and stuff, but with the rise of HTML5, increas­ing my JS knowl­edge could come in handy.

WebGL also has the advan­tage that it is a well-​​defined and con­tained set of OpenGL func­tion­al­ity, con­trary to the desk­top ver­sion where there are many dif­fer­ent ver­sions, each dep­re­cat­ing some­thing etc, so that it becomes hard and con­fus­ing to fig­ure out what func­tion­al­ity should be used (e.g. doing stuff in a dep­re­cated way to main­tain com­pat­i­bil­ity with older hard­ware or cod­ing “the right, mod­ern way” that’ll prob­a­bly break many bad drivers).

So, looks like I might be lean­ing towards WebGL, but need to read a cou­ple of more tuto­ri­als and run some tests before I can say for sure.