
Pearl Boy WebGL Demo - hiteshtr
http://gooengine.com/demofiles/pearl-boy/index.html
======
DanielRibeiro
This was showcased along many other great WebGL demos a month ago:
[http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/webgl-...](http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/webgl-
breaking-into-the-real-world/)

------
themgt
Awesome graphics and low time-to-crate:
<http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html>

------
edvinbesic
This actually worked great om my BlackBerry Z10. I had no idea it supported
WebGL, thought it was going to be a write up along with the demo i could read
but was pretty surprised when the demo kicked in.

Graphics look great and everything feels smooth, hope they make a game out of
it.

------
raymond_goo
Thanks for all the nice compliments and thanks for pointers on where we need
to improve things ! :-)

Consider signing up for the alpha, we hope we can let in another round of
users soon !

~~~
pornel
Do you prevent default action in keyboard and click handlers? In Opera and
Firefox I can sometimes see focus outline and text selection flashing,
probably activated by my 1-key keyboard shortcuts.

~~~
raymond_goo
Good question. I looked at the code and it appears we preventDefault for
mouseup and mousedown but not for keyup and keydown. I will ask around why
that's the case. Can you give me an example keyboard shortcut where this is
happening ?

~~~
pornel
W and S in Opera select paragraphs (if you enable advanced shortcuts like I
did). In Firefox I'm able to drag and select whole canvas (entire screen
flashes light blue).

------
kayoone
this was on the frontpage already a while ago, cant find the HN discussion
link but this was the linked content:
[http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/webgl-...](http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/webgl-
breaking-into-the-real-world/)

Its looks nice and all, but these kind of WebGL demos arent all that
impressive anymore now that we have seen things like the unreal engine running
in the browser. <http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/>

There isnt really alot you cannot do with WebGL today. If i showed you this as
a compiled C++ demo, most probably wouldnt be impressed.

~~~
hiteshtr
But i find the loading time of unreal engine very slow, their is more to
happen

------
aooeeu
Not great if your keyboard is in Dvorak :-)

~~~
elisee
Yup, this is a real problem with game input on the Web platform right now. You
can't get geographic keycodes, only virtual keycodes. I haven't stumbled on
any specification / API proposal to fix this. Anybody know if browser vendors
have something in the works?

~~~
justinhj
Until then an option to choose Dvorak for the user and manual remapping of the
keys would work for apps that want to support those keyboards.

~~~
elisee
Yeah but then you need to support AZERTY (French), QWERTZ (Central Europe) and
lots of other layouts too if you want to cover most people.

------
TallboyOne
I think this is my favorite WebGL demo of all time:
<http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/>

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
In case anyone else has this problem: I had to disable AdBlock for it to
recognise mouse clicks/movement.

~~~
vanderZwan
Thanks. Also, I had to turn off Firefox Quick Find in Advanced -> General ->
"Search for text when I start typing"

------
obviouslygreen
This is the first WebGL demo I've seen on HN (or anywhere else, but I don't
exactly go looking for them) that not only works, but works very well, in
Chromium on Ubuntu.

Granted, I'm on 11.10, so perhaps my browser is a bit out of date... still,
though, it's kind of nice to see what all the fuss is about. The game played
very smoothly for me.

~~~
jstanley
I'm Chromium 25 on Ubuntu, and I get "Your browser doesn't seem to support
HTML5 and WebGL. The best thing to do is upgrade to a modern browser that
supports all the awesome things the web has to offer"

~~~
miniatureape
Some graphics cards won't work.

For me, it worked great. Until it crashed my entire browser.

~~~
gcr
On linux, the nvidia driver will happily and reliably panic my entire system
when I try these things. Thank goodness I'm on different hardware now.

------
Hugeen
I really enjoy seeing new WebGL games emerge. This one is very fluid and
beautiful.

~~~
maciekp
But it's not a game, out of curiosity, are there any good games written in
WebGL(because all I see are demos)?

~~~
shanelja
<http://www.runescape.com> has been rewritten entirely in WebGL, they just
released the beta and are upgrading the entire game in the next month or so.

It's pretty big news, as far as I know they are the first major MMO to swap to
WebGL. They were using Java and had been building on it for nearly 10 years
but they found that WebGL offered better graphics performance and easier
programming than it's Java equivalent so decided to switch. It is slower,
probably around 10 or 15%, but offset by all the new graphical features,
longer draw distances, more vivid colours, etc.

~~~
camus
they are still using java , just checked 1 hour ago.

~~~
shanelja
_"they just released the beta and are upgrading the entire game in the next
month or so."_

------
kevingadd
Incredibly flickery, and the camera and player character frequently clip
through the terrain. Nice animations and music though.

~~~
raymond_goo
What Browser are you using ?

------
dougk16
Extremely cool atmosphere created in this demo. In the deeper waters, I was
really held in suspense, waiting for the music to turn ominous and a sea
monster to eat me, but alas it didn't happen.

Minor feedback, it seemed like the instructions would disappear before I had a
chance to read them...maybe just me. Quick enough to figure out though.

------
pawelwentpawel
Even though it might have been already showcased some time ago I haven't seen
it yet. It's beautiful. I especially like the reflective water. Parallax
effect in the diving mode is also a nice touch adding some extra depth.

Have any of you tried running it on iPhone 5? I wonder if there were any
performance issues (if it worked at all!;).

~~~
raymond_goo
There is a trick running the web browser on an iPhone with WebGL enabled using
testflightapp. We hope that Apple will enable WebGL as a default soon.
Basically the technology is all there...

~~~
joshschreuder
If jailbroken, you can enable WebGL with the Enable WebGL tweak (free).

For what it's worth, it works really nicely on the iPhone 5 in Chrome with
this enabled.

------
shdon
On both Firefox and Chrome on Mac OS X (10.6.8), the water itself flickers
quite badly, despite a smooth framerate.

~~~
shocks
What versions? No problems for me. Firefox v24 and Chrome 29.0.1514.0 canary.

~~~
shdon
The current release versions of Chrome (27) and Firefox (21). Both auto-
updated. Since the flicker is the same in different browsers, it may be more
of an OS or graphics driver thing.

~~~
raymond_goo
We have many guys working on the demos using MacOS. So I agree that it sounds
like a driver thing. What graphics card are you using ?

------
belgianguy
I hadn't seen WebGL look so pretty and fluid, if they can create a whole game
like this, it might be a pretty viable platform.

The link in the upper right corner gives a Drupal PDOException error, though.

~~~
hmbg
Yes, it seems the server was not expecting this kind of attention. Should be
fixed now.

------
apunic
Butter smooth and so atmospheric graphics, especially the rowing part

~~~
drewcrawford
I see a lot of jitter on a very fast Mac. (Safari 6.0.4).

Somebody who understands Web GL tell me -- developer's fault or browser's
fault? It looks a little like numerical instability to me rather than a
framerate issue per se, but I'm no 3D expert.

<http://jsbench.s3.amazonaws.com/jitter.m4v>

~~~
dtf
What's it like on Chrome? Sometimes these things can be an issue with the GC.

------
zopticity
Pretty impressive. Too bad it doesn't have collision detection yet. I love the
reflection!

Another step closer...to console games on the browser.

~~~
lukedjn
Collision detection works on the crates underwater. Not sure why they didn't
use it on the floating crates.

------
shocks
Smooth as silk, Firefox v24 (Nightly). I'm seeing approx 60FPS with no visible
CPU/GPU load. Wonderful! :D

~~~
m_eiman
Doesn't work on the current release of Firefox though. Webkit/Chrome really is
turning into the IE of this decade :P

~~~
ddon
Yep, getting TypeError: document.body is null in console in Firefox 21.0

~~~
raymond_goo
Damn, this should work, we do support Firefox 21 ! It's probably a regression
in the demo itself and not the engine. We'll fix it asap, thanks for the tip !

~~~
raymond_goo
Ok, try reloading the page. We use requirejs but not the domready! plugin. So
there seems to be a race condition with the body loading. Sorry for that,
we'll fix it asap.

~~~
m_eiman
I tried again now, still getting the same error.

~~~
m_eiman
... but now it worked.

------
dannysatan
works nicely on Nexus 4 in chrome :)

~~~
wjoe
In Chrome on my One X, it says the browser isn't supported. Works well with
Firefox Aurora, though the graphics are noticeably worse than running it on a
desktop browser.

------
andyhmltn
Wow. Awesome graphics for the web!

------
timinman
Beautiful.

------
derleth
Doesn't load at all for me. I can load other WebGL demos on this browser, just
not this one.

~~~
raymond_goo
Sounds like you have Firefox, we currently have an issue on FF21. Please give
it another go early next week.

~~~
derleth
Right. FF21 on Linux. I will.

------
AutocorrectThis
>Your browser doesn't seem to support HTML5 and WebGL. The best thing to do is
upgrade to a modern browser that supports all the awesome things the web has
to offer.

I am on the latest version of Opera which I guess is not a modern browser.
Perhaps turning down the condescension a notch and changing that "Upgrade"
message to "Best works in Chrome" will be a good move. You're a second class
citizen on HN if you use anything but Chrome.

~~~
Wintamute
I don't read much/any condescension in that message. Fair enough if you enjoy
to use Opera, but why not have Chrome installed on your machine too so you can
spin it up and view content like this when needed?

~~~
hiteshtr
Also Mozilla as these two browser are far better than Opera and IE, its good
to have multiple browser installed in system for experiments and trial

------
pvnick
To the complainers and criticizers here: shut up, this is great.

