

Eve Online spaceship viewer uses WebGL - lloeki
http://www.eveonline.com/universe/spaceships/

======
daeken
So, this is a bit of an aside, but last night I wrote a patch for WebView on
iOS to enable WebGL in Safari (which I believe I'm releasing on the Cydia
store soon for $1 probably; I figure why not), and the iPad 3 runs this
_really_ well: <http://i.imgur.com/rs70S.jpg>

Smooth as butter, but it seems that everyone uses onmousedown/over/up rather
than ontouch* events, so click-to-view type things don't work at all on iOS,
meaning you can't rotate the model here. I guess that's simply because WebGL
has been 99.9% on the desktop so far, with the few exceptions being Mobile
Firefox, Boot2Gecko, and the Playbook browser. Still interesting I think,
though.

~~~
tar
Please post your patch on HN when you release it. I think many HN readers
would be interested.

~~~
daeken
Definitely will! Just waiting to hear from saurik about getting it in the
store. Hopefully it'll be up soon.

~~~
magicalist
Not to dash any hopes of getting rich on this :) but is your patch
significantly different than this:

[http://atnan.com/blog/2011/11/03/enabling-and-using-webgl-
on...](http://atnan.com/blog/2011/11/03/enabling-and-using-webgl-on-ios/)

? I've never tried it, but the occasional screenshot and video have shown up
online from people saying it works pretty well.

~~~
daeken
Yes-ish. Same exact mechanism to enable it inside the WebView, but the tough
(well, marginally) part is how you apply that to all the WebViews on the
system.

Don't get me wrong, this is _not_ a substantial patch. However, it saves you
from a couple hours of debugging random issues; I don't think $1 is
unreasonable. I don't really care about making money off it, though, I'm just
curious to see how it does.

------
druiid
I have to say that this is quite impressive. Not only do the models appear
very smooth (and fast), but the textures look great and with lighting, etc.

There is one question I have had that this reminds me of, and that is if there
are any really impressive WebGL demos out there. I looked a while back and was
not able to run across anything significant. Right now to me it seems like
WebGL is technically proficient but distributed less widely than even VRML
was.

~~~
ricardobeat
Not true at all. See:

<http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/>

<http://www.webgl.com/category/webgl-games/>

<http://playwebgl.com/>

The main obstacle to wider adoption is the lack of support in IE. IE10 will
hopefully fix that, and meanwhile it's losing share.

~~~
satu
Don't forget the blog at <http://www.webgl.com> which is updated almost
everyday.

------
archivator
Something must be wrong with their feature detection 'cause all I see in
Chrome and Firefox are some well-rendered sky and engine lights. Linux, Chrome
19, Firefox 12, nouveau drivers.

~~~
evmar
I'd be very surprised if Chrome didn't blacklist nouveau; perhaps you're
overriding this behavior with a command-line flag? Visit about:version to
check.

~~~
gcr
Why would Chrome blacklist Nouveau? I'm sure it's far less hacky than the
official Nvidia binary blob.

~~~
archangel_one
We have no idea whether the nvidia driver is hacky or not, but it does
actually work quite well, whereas nouveau is (or was the last time I checked)
still known to have features/cards that aren't supported.

------
huhtenberg
Any opinions on Eve as a game? Been considering it as a primary time sink for
a while now.

~~~
harshreality
If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do something
productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your own.

The UI is purposely opaque so that automating things is very difficult, and of
course in-game automated activity (scripting the UI) is banned by the EULA.
That's the opposite of what any hacker naturally wants to do, because it's
simply not productive.

The interesting aspects of EVE are human aspects: running corporations and
alliances, and spying. However, the sheer amount of work to get into a
position of authority in a corp or alliance worth being in, and the amount of
tedious logistics involved when you are in the leadership, make the exercise
overall not worth it.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _If you want a time sink, learn a new language, start a website, do
> something productive. Don't play in someone else's sandbox; create your
> own._

Awesome. How have I ever not thought about and done any of that.

~~~
harshreality
Sarcasm aside, commercial game sandboxes are designed to get you to do tedious
repetitive crap in order to get enough in-game resources to be able to do
interesting things.

The interesting parts of EVE are not the problem. The problem is the tedious
parts. Either you end up grinding in-game to get isk (in-game money), or you
pay real money to buy GTCs and sell them in-game to get isk.

Once you understand all the aspects of the game, Only PVP remains interesting.
The ratio of game tedium (flying around, maintaining any resources you
control, finding people to fight, etc) to actual fighting (or market
manipulation if you're a trader) is unacceptably high.

Let me try to elaborate.

In order to get to the point where you can do most things in EVE, you need isk
and you need a character ("toon") with a lot of skillpoints. You can convert
real money into isk and use isk to buy other people's toons, but you end up
spending a significant amount of money one way or another to get a good
character.

A moderately capable toon might have 50M skillpoints, and might have ten or
twenty billion ISK. If $35 60-day GTCs are worth about 500mil (I haven't
checked recently, but it's the right order of magnitude), and that toon costs
8 billion, that's $560 worth of GTCs for the toon, and another $700-$1500 in
liquid assets for the toon, on top of the $12-$20/mo you pay for the
subscription.

Or, you can plod along with your own character which will take years to get
that much experience. (Toon prices _very roughly_ track the cumulative
subscription cost for the time it takes to accumulate that many skillpoints.)

When you gain an understanding of most of the game, either you quit, or you
keep your subscription going because you think you might want to play again
some day though you probably won't, or you get addicted to the corp logistics
or PVE grinding aspects of the game, and you mistake that for a fun
distraction.

Regarding game architecture, although the initial design with stackless python
was clever and scaled pretty well into the range of 10s of thousands of users,
their overall architecture is horrid. It's stackless python around a small
core implemented in C, a MS SQL database that crashes frequently, and a one-
solar-system-per-process model that created so many performance problems for
fleet fights that they've resorted to "time dilation" (read: slow down fights
so the servers can handle it). For the longest time, their SQL database would
crash, and their response was "we're _failing over_ to the backup database,
it'll be back up in xx minutes", clearly indicating they have no idea what
failover or redundancy actually means.

Also, be warned that if you do anything even remotely against CCP's interests,
you can get banned. That includes downloading leaked EVE "source code",
talking about vulnerabilities publicly, or similar kinds of things. They don't
tolerate criticism very well.

------
donum
Works fine for me. (Windows 7 64bit, Chrome 19.0.1084.52 m)

I really like the Idea of using WebGL to show how parts of the game actually
look like. It's also very smooth, only the 'Battleship' (Amarr) is a bit
choppy for me.

------
jrockway
Not sure if bug in WebGL or if spaceships in Eve Online have cloaking devices
that make everything except their exhaust invisible.

------
AlexFromBelgium
Works perfectly on a macbook (Chrome 19). I've not gotten WebGL to work on
Linux with nouveau drivers though..

------
leeoniya
ff nightly working ok here - looks great.

------
tom9729
Bit slow on my D620 (Chrome 18, Windows 7, NVS110M) but looks great.

~~~
nextparadigms
Why are you still on Chrome 18? I think 19 added some further graphics/webgl
improvements. It might work better with it.

~~~
tom9729
Chrome's been bugging me to restart, I've just been too lazy to do so. :)

