

The future of O3D - felixmar
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/future-of-o3d.html

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bd
Ouch, this is very disappointing. O3D was technologically better approach than
WebGL.

JavaScript is a perfect scripting/glue language, but unfortunately it still
sucks at numerical computations.

Yes, even with all the massive progress that happened recently with
V8/TraceMonkey/Carakan. Try working with large arrays and you will weep.

Well, good news is at least this will force JS engine developers to improve
this so far neglected aspect.

~~~
msie
Ugh, JavaScript! We'll be stuck with JavaScript forever! Time for a new
browser to be developed. But I doubt that will happen. Sad to see no major new
operating systems, pc architectures, browsers being developed. Now it's all:
\- linux, osx, windows \- intel \- ff, webkit, opera Yep, people standing on
the shoulders of giants but we need some new giants.

~~~
Detrus
NativeClient will support other languages and through a new plugin API,
they'll be able to link up with HTML, CSS just like JS can.

Only the other browsers have to agree to implement it. Minor little problem.

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nkassis
Reposting from another submission of this: This is a little annoying. Google
had not said a word about O3D for months and they just announce now that they
want to drop the plugin. I think a better idea would have been to use the
plugin as a way to provide WebGL and o3d to older browsers until WebGL is
widespread. Some of the O3D features are not even possible in WebGL.

EDIT: the google group thread explaining about this:
[http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss/browse_thread/thr...](http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss/browse_thread/thr..).

EDIT: Google reiterated that they prefer that Google Frame implements WebGL
for IE instead of turning O3D into a complete HTML5 implementation to support
api O3D/WebGL developers need.

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sadiq
Whee. Hopefully this will help accelerate WebGL-adoption even further and we
can avoid getting locked in to yet another proprietry plugin, in the form of
Unity.

I've a feeling that good tools and engines for WebGL-based are going to be
needed though.

~~~
Detrus
I thought they'd use O3D together with NativeClient which is open source. I
doubt Google would bother with some proprietary plugin, their entire OS is
open source.

NativeClient would make plugins second nature to the web. They could be
downloaded and installed as seamlessly as javascript frameworks.

But since they have no guarantee that NativeClient will be adopted as a
standard, they're not putting all of their eggs in that basket. Apparently
they can get the speed out of WebGL some other way.

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JoelMcCracken
I really hope this takes off. I've been wanting to get into making some 3D
games for a while, and being able to do it in the browser would be _awesome_

