
Show HN: War and Peace and WebGL - wjd
http://wdobbie.com/post/war-and-peace-and-webgl/
======
IvanK_net
This discussion reminds me times 4 years ago, when I showed my WebGL games to
my firends and instead of getting an interesting feedback, 90% of comments
were about my games not working on their devices. Sad to see the same thing in
2016 :(

~~~
chippy
Oddly, my machines really did creak with WebGL, but it appears as if they have
been improving in performance. It's probably not graphic drivers as this
ubuntu laptop hasn't had a new graphics driver since 2013. It must be the
browsers improving performance. Anyone else noticed WebGL working better these
days on the same hardware?

~~~
overgard
I work on the renderer for a product that uses WebGL (I won't link to it
because I don't want to sound like a shill, but it's a web based 3d modeler
called FormIt).

Unfortunately, I think webgl performance has actually been getting much worse
on Chrome. (Firefox has been fine).

WebGL is pretty exciting in what it makes possible, but it's based on the
OpenGL ES2 spec from 2007 which is way out of date at this point, so the
surface area of the hardware you can actually use is really limited, and
various aspects of javascript lead to some really ugly performance
compromises. This is partially why I'm pretty excited about web assembly -- I
don't think it'll fix everything off the bat, but not having to go through
javascript could be a really big win.

------
fla
I'm curious about the choice of bmp for
[http://wdobbie.com/warandpeace/glyphs.bmp](http://wdobbie.com/warandpeace/glyphs.bmp)

Why not a png ?

Edit: So after a quick test:

* glyphs.bmp 53.5 MB

* glyphs.png 7.6 MB

I guess it could be shrinked even more.

~~~
wjd
The .bmp file is served gzipped to 7 MB.

LZMA and Bzip2 both get it down to about 3 MB but I'd need to use a javascript
decompressor.

~~~
fla
Makes sense. My bad, I tested with wget and compression was disabled.

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smy1es
It works well for me in several platforms.

What would improve it is when you zoom, with the mouse wheel or gesture if it
would zoom in on the mouse cursor point rather than at the centre of the
screen.

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arethuza
Works fine, and is rather impressive, on Windows 10 - both in FF and Chrome.

Doesn't work on iPad - just get blank pages.

~~~
kyriakos
Windows 10 chrome. doesn't work. chrome canary didn't work (some d3d errors)
edge (i gave up after waiting for 2 minutes to load)

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fizixer
Not really sure this is an unsolved problem in other contexts. For example,
any good image viewer would have no-shimmering at all scales.

You simply render your text as images and then apply the method already used
by the image viewers.

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timon999
I'm getting some weird artifacts:
[http://i.imgur.com/U3sSkW3.png](http://i.imgur.com/U3sSkW3.png)

Ubuntu Gnome, AMD open source driver

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greggman
interesting technique but it's extremely slow on Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB (and
so I assume other machines). Like when zoomed in it's under 2fps whereas I
suspect the built in chrome text renderer can do that much faster (generating
texture glyphs of the needed characters at the desired res and then rendering
them). I'm curious why drawing less characters (like 5 giant characters) runs
at 2fps. Is the shader that heavy?

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exDM69
I see all white pages with no text on them. "Show grid" shows yellow and green
rectangles. Linux, Firefox 43, Nvidia proprietary drivers.

~~~
wjd
Loaded up linux and I got the same issue. Working on it!

~~~
wjd
Should be fixed now!

~~~
exDM69
Yes, works like a charm now. Really nicely rendered. Good job!

What was the issue?

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cimbal
I really like this demo, but it reliably crashes a mid 2012 macbook pro with
lion, both on firefox and safari (the older version of the demo was the same).

Now, reading the other comments, i wonder if there are any tools that help
with diagnosing device capabilities? I don't have high hopes of integrating
anything WebGL related in my projects due to these problems, so how can you
make sure that WebGL code will work across devices?

Edit: How can you make sure you notice when it's not working?

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moron4hire
It's almost completely unreadable on my Android phone. The character shapes
are mostly there, but the triangles overlap in weird ways, like vertex order
might be wrong it something.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvutftylbj77d8r/Screenshot_2016-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/cvutftylbj77d8r/Screenshot_2016-01-24-11-13-37.png?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3qn9h5pgw2p671/Screenshot_2016-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3qn9h5pgw2p671/Screenshot_2016-01-24-11-15-18.png?dl=0)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4h93ycueykrjai/Screenshot_2016-01...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4h93ycueykrjai/Screenshot_2016-01-24-11-17-19.png?dl=0)

