
Show HN: A WebGL Tribute to Tron, the movie that made me fall in love with CGI - mgzme
https://mgz.me/?scene=TheLightCycles
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avolcano
This is fantastic! Is it open source, by any chance? I'd love to see how you
implemented the scanline filters and particle effects.

I've been juuust dipping my toe into 3D games with a little spline generator
I'm hoping to make a game with
([https://disco.zone/splines/3/](https://disco.zone/splines/3/)), and as a
fellow Tron fan, I'm very inspired by what you were able to do aesthetically
here!

~~~
fractallyte
That's strangely reminiscent of the gameplay from Stunt Car Racer on the
Amiga...

You should definitely keep going with this!

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Yen
Looks great!

This kind of generative art is, I think, one of the best "non-productive"
things that computers have enabled.

Two extremely minor nitpicks -

* When browsing through scenes, I notice that a title subtly fades in and out in the lower left corner. I missed this for the first several scenes, and then would often miss it when hitting a new scene, and I'd wonder what the scene was called.

* The "gallery" menu to choose scenes isn't in the upper-left nav, but rather, the hamburger menu. Before trying it out, I expected that clicking on it would take me away from the graphics, and show me a gallery of other projects.

~~~
amelius
Another nitpick: it hijacks the back button.

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austincheney
Nice demo. It works well on my IPhone except that it breaks the back button in
Safari. If you are making changes to the page address please use
location.replace to avoid extra steps in the browser history.

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bitwize
Nice! Some of these also remind me of Rez, which after eighteen years is still
my favorite video game.

~~~
syoc
Reminds me of GLtron. It's GPL and tons of fun.
[http://gltron.org/](http://gltron.org/)

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jsgo
Maybe a typo, maybe not, but near the end of the About section it says
“...pure sweatness...”. Was thinking sweetness, but may be intentional as
well.

Regardless, very well done. Liked the ability to swipe on my phone to
essentially shift camera direction temporarily (specifically, during the
“city” view). Everything seemed well thought out and interactive. Looked great
and performed well on an iPhone X in Safari.

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rb808
Nice! I saw it was made with threejs which I hadnt really seen before. Gallery
looks awesome. [https://threejs.org/](https://threejs.org/) eg [https://bruno-
simon.com/](https://bruno-simon.com/)

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Melting_Harps
Very cool, it reminds me of Lifelike - So Electric music video; that was like
one of the first synthwave tracks I ever head, too. Thanks for reminding me of
it.

Never got into Tron, might have started it but left it mid way or earlier. And
when the Disney versions came out I never bothered. I might give it a go this
weekend.

~~~
on_and_off
The new movie has a fantastic soundtrack and awesome CGI.

Sadly that's pretty much the only parts that keep it fresh. It is pretty
forgettable and uses some tropes that are both very lazy and "problematic"
like born sexy yesterday.

Still, if you end up watching the first one and liking it, it might be worth a
watch as well.

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djaychela
I think it's incredible that a website and desktop computer can generate the
kind of graphics in real-time that were state-of-the-art (and not real-time)
"only" 38 years ago. I would show this to my friends, but none of them are
technical so they'd just think it was a video that's playing.

Great work, thanks for sharing.

(And please fix the back button!)

~~~
naavis
It works decently even on a smartphone.

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rhizome31
It didn't work on mine. There was a loading screen and then it pretty much
froze the browser and I had to kill the tab.

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lmedinas
Pretty cool! You got some other impressive projects in your website. Congrats!

It's impressive the type of 3D graphics that can be done in a modern browser,
i'm surprised why we don't see more websites using these technologies.

~~~
cycloptic
With all due respect, please don't encourage more websites to use WebGL for
trivial things! This stuff is only really useful for games or some other kind
of interactive demo, and wastes power when used for decorative graphics on
ordinary informational web sites.

I think compiling native OpenGL ES programs to WASM is probably a bit more of
a practical use case, but that comes with its own set of problems... WebGL
still suffers from various security issues and bugs on certain platforms:
[https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/gpu/config/...](https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/master/gpu/config/software_rendering_list.json)

~~~
BubRoss
If only someone would invent a back button so you wouldn't have to stay on the
same page.

Also OpenGl ES isn't something that is compiled to WASM, it is a javascript
API. WASM does not have access to the DOM or IO.

~~~
cycloptic
I'm not sure what you're saying. WASM can definitely get access to those
things through javascript shims. A native OpenGL ES program can be compiled
relatively easily to WASM because it maps one-to-one with the WebGL API and
barely needs a shim at all. This has been supported in Emscripten for a while
now and makes it a lot easier to do things like port mobile games over to the
web.

~~~
BubRoss
Yes, this is a more detailed version of what I said. Which part makes you want
to control what other people make?

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Venkatesh10
Looks good, but back button doesn't work when inside the website and I had to
close the tab.

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pjmlp
It looks great on the desktop.

On a Nokia 7.1 Plus not so much, too slow loading the resource and it drops
frames.

~~~
lsb
On a Pixel 4 it looks great!

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Folcon
This is really attractive, but a warning about it having a autoplaying
soundtrack that I was not expecting and had no idea how to easily mute without
killing the page.

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29athrowaway
If you want a higher framerate, make the window smaller.

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sixothree
The future was supposed to have surface lighting.

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skavi
this is so stylish. used to love stuff like this on the chrome experiments
website.

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the_squirrel
Great effort!

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spiritplumber
oooh, shiny.

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noughtme
Nice! But also, please stop breaking the back button.

~~~
mgzme
Thank you so much for the feedback! I'll keep in mind as a priority to fix the
back button issue. I'm glad you enjoyed the scenes.

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SmallPeePeeMan
How is this done? I mean, are they original animations or mapped from videos
in some automated way?

