
ROME HTML5 demo - pfleidi
http://www.ro.me
======
daeken
Well, I've been on the fence for a while, but I'm fairly sure that I'm not
going to build native code demos anymore. WebGL just enables far too much
awesome stuff. This demo on its own was impressive, but the fact that people
are able to design new parts of the demo is what sets it apart.

With WebGL, it becomes simple to build an online, collaborative demotool where
group members can easily work together on building new productions. That's
simply unprecedented and may lead to a rebirth of the demoscene.

~~~
romland
Sadly, I also think it will commercialize it on a whole different level and
take away the innocence. But ah, ch-ch-ch-changes -- not all bad.

Personally I haven't been involved in the demo-scene for some 15 years but
every now and then I indulge myself in the latest releases at
<http://pouet.net> and find myself having lost a whole evening. That said,
from what I have seen, and if this was indeed cutting-edge, we still have
quite a bit to go... But yeah, we are definitely getting there. Not sure
whether to jump for joy, though. :)

~~~
daeken
There will always be those that do it because they enjoy making something
beautiful and challenging, even as others take it in commercial directions.

~~~
romland
Naturally, but I think my biggest issue was one of melancholy, I mean, gone
are the days of asm("movl %ecx %eax");. Or do we get that in V8? :)

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jarin
This is simply amazing. Admittedly, I downloaded the leaked album minutes
before seeing this link, but after watching this 4 times in a row I now have
the song stuck in my head and just pre-ordered the album on iTunes.

Oh yeah, and if you see a smiley face on the ground in the desert scene I made
that :)

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navs
Nothing makes my MacBook sound more like an aircraft during takeoff than a
WebGL/HTML5 experiment. I like to think I have a decent computer (MacBook Pro
Gen 5) but it couldn't handle this. I suspect my slow internet connection
might be another possible reason.

~~~
fabjan
> Nothing makes my MacBook sound more like an aircraft during takeoff than a
> WebGL/HTML5 experiment.

Not even flash?

~~~
riffraff
FWIW YMMV IME: with a macbook pro of the latest generation, no, not even flash
:(

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pedrokost
He provides useful code and explanation of how the website was made:
<http://www.ro.me/tech>

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9999
Having disabled webgl due to security vulnerabilities, I can't actually see
this in FF4. Can someone describe it for me? Is it pretty?

Hey, remember when we all thought that HTML5 and emerging technologies like
webgl would be so cool and so much more secure than Flash? Yeah....

~~~
zokier
I also remember when we all thought that HTML5 would bring interoperability...
Instead of "Designed for IE" we now have "Designed for Chrome". Is Google
really that much better than Microsoft, or does the internet just have
goldfish-like memory.

~~~
melling
Google updates their browser every 12 weeks, and they're making sure everyone
upgrades. While IE9 is a nice upgrade, IE still lags behind the other modern
browsers. Furthermore, to date they have no plans to support WebGL. Id gladly
put Google in Microsoft's place.

Having said that, we should be converging on open standards.

~~~
magicalist
it's important to remember that the W3C is dependent on working
implementations for specs to become finalized recommendations. the fact that
you can use the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features, even if their spec isn't
finished yet, isn't some kind of nefarious plot to embrace, extend, etc., and
vendor prefixes, as annoying as they are, just mean that we won't be burdened
later if specs change before they are finished.

the webgl 1.0 spec has been finalized. even though this was built with some
google employees and is featured on a _chrome_ experiments page, it works just
fine in my Firefox 4 and webkit nightly. I think we'll be ok.

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jasonkester
_We are very sorry, but “3 Dreams of Black” is an experiment and unfortunately
does not currently function on every configuration. It appears that your
computer's graphics card doesn't support WebGL technology. You can find more
details for troubleshooting here and obtain a list of recommended graphics
cards._

That's what I see on the latest build of Chrome, and in FF4, on my one year
old laptop.

So now in addition to supporting a big pile of browsers, we're expected to
support a big pile of video cards and hardware configurations too? Isn't this
the reason we moved to web apps 15 years ago?

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Interesting. I am using Chrome with _\--ignore-gpu-blacklist_ flag, and can
run webgl apps on browser quite well (one such as Doobs' minecraft demo[1]).
Yet, the site won't let me run it on Chrome.

[1]
[http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_geometry_mi...](http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_geometry_minecraft_ao.html)

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dendory
The message asking me to download Chrome on an otherwise empty page reminds me
of those early 90s sites that said best viewed in Netscape 3 or IE5...

Plus it's of no use to me, seeing I'm on an iPad right now.

~~~
sevensixnine
It's not use to me either since I refuse to use Chrome.

~~~
dvdhsu
Why?

~~~
heyimfromreddit
Probably privacy concerns.

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pacomerh
Man, this would still be cool even if it wasn't rendering the 3D/webgl, the
composition is very good

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tga
From an end user's perspective, this demo is a monstrosity (like pretty much
all WebGL stuff I've ran across so far). I opened the link in a background
tab, then my system started thrashing and Firefox got stuck. Restarted Firefox
only to have it reload the tabs and freeze again. Had it running in the end
and got to see the 3D butterflies flying around in a choppy music video.

Thanks, I'll go look for the disable button now.

~~~
Auguste
It's quite CPU-intensive, but well worth watching if you can get it to work. I
had to watch it in Chrome and bump my screen resolution down to 1024*768 to
watch it smoothly. It was well worth it.

~~~
tga
I don't think that having to _bump your screen resolution_ to get a
website/video working is anywhere close to reasonable. The point was to
replace Flash for web multimedia because it was too resource intensive and
unstable. What we see now is a half-supported proof of concept growing out of
unrelated technologies.

This might be the beginning of something great, but WebGL still has miles to
go before being viable mass consumption technology and it's important to
recognize that.

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markbao
Absolutely beautiful.

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mkeblx
How does the running performance of WebGL compare to what would be possible if
it was a native app? Are there inherent limitations of implementing this in
the context of the web that will keep it much slower or will continuing
optimization and things like hardware accelerated canvas elements allow
achieving near parity (>80%) in performance?

~~~
romland
Well, the short answer is: hard to say. A lot of work is off-loaded on GPU's
now days, and theoretically there should be no reason why talking to the
video-card through a browser should be slower than talking to it through a
portable executable (.exe). The reality of it is that there is far more
sandboxing and verification that needs to be done since no one likes having
their browser crashed out of the blue. As for performance of languages
(JavaScript vs C or x86), naturally, you will always get more performance the
closer to the iron you are but it's getting fairly blurred and
compilers/interpreters are pretty damn smart these days.

I realize I'm not answering your question entirely, but what I read between
the lines is you're wondering whether WebGL will be able to replace "native"
applications, performance-wise in the future. The ball is in the air on that
one, and it's about to be caught by Intel/AMD/nVidia. And I bet you they are
already cuddling with the browser-developers (or at least rubbing their hands
in glee).

I guess the quick and dirty test for the state of things right now is to
simply check the CPU/GPU performance on this one and compare it with current
top of the month here: <http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=56871> (note that this
is a 64KiB demo -- in comparison, the background picture of
<http://romealbum.com/> is three times bigger).

A more fair comparison would be: <http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=56900> (also
released this month, it seems)

Do let me know if you come to any kind of conclusion :)

~~~
cheez
I think it much depends on how much work you're doing. If you're just viewing
a static 3D model and doing some scaling or rotation, it's not so bad but if
you're adding/removing/translating objects, it's going to be ass slow in
JavaScript. One's best bet is probably to write your code procedurally and
hope that V8 can compile it to machine code really well.

WebGL is really good and it's only going to get better as long as the creators
of the browsers make enough money to subsidize the optimization.

It may be that Chrome/V8 need to start using LLVM.

~~~
daeken
> It may be that Chrome/V8 need to start using LLVM.

LLVM is far too heavy to be used in such a situation -- page load times would
rise dramatically. Really, V8 just needs to start doing hot spot
optimizations. Do a quick first pass like they're doing now, then
incrementally optimize away the hot spots. If I had to take a guess, I'd say
that'll be coming in the next year, in some form or another.

~~~
riffraff
I believe, hot spot optimization is what the new crankshaft infrastructure was
about, or are you thinking of something else?

~~~
daeken
Ah yes, I forgot all about that. Guess it's not a prediction if it's already
come true. Anyway, more focus will be put on such things, as we're about as
far along as we can get with the initial fast compilation.

~~~
cheez
I'm used to it. I invented alphanumeric pagers in high school about 5 years
after they were available (I had no idea they existed...)

------
jeffreymcmanus
Silly rabbits, I am too using Google Chrome.

~~~
po
I got this same error when viewing it with Chrome. Seems like a huge mistake,
because as a normal user there's nothing you can do.

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cambriar
I came across this demo by the same guy, Chris Milk. It uses your home address
to provide a personal experience. I think Chris is on to something.

<http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/>

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rglover
A bit laggy but amazing that it's even possible. Can't wait to see what this
looks like in the future. I hope we'll see something like CS Source or a
similar title ported over in the next couple of years.

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Encosia
Combining this and a Kinect tracking head movement for interaction would be
interesting. Imagine something like that as the routine music video experience
on your TV in the future.

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SonicSoul
stunning! can't stop re-playing it. such awesome use of technology to create
beautify art. also pretty happy my system is handling it with no problems..

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jbrennan
Eats your back button in Safari 5.

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becomevocal
WebGL will change the web. Give it time. This is just the awesome beginning.

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kenkam
A superb demonstration and an excellent song. Well done Google!

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seanalltogether
wow, that put my whole system into a spin lock for about 5 minutes. not fun.

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splitrocket
Most impressive.

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sevensixnine
Requires a browser coded by an advertising agency. No thanks.

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grab
impressive.

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shazow
This music video is more interactive than most videogames today.

