

WebGL can no longer use cross-domain textures in Firefox 5 - daredevildave
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/WebGL/Cross-Domain_Textures

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yesimahuman
One workaround is to "mirror" the images: send the url of each texture image
to your own server and download it back again. This does funnel a potentially
large amount of traffic through a small number of machines though and loads
the image from a new IP.

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rwmj
Why on earth is this stuff in browser in the first place? Just so that a tiny
handful of web pages can show GL demos? It's just crazy to include all this
functionality in mainstream browsers.

~~~
wladimir
Gaming.

A large part of people is using the web for (casual MMO) gaming. 3D gaming is
very popular and attracts users. Currently this involves hacks using clunky
applets (such as java3d). With WebGL, this will be a thing of the past.

3D in the browser has been tried before with VRML, which failed. One of the
reasons for failing was that is was too high-level. Most game devs want to use
low-level APIs such as OpenGL. Hence I think WebGL will be huge success.

~~~
palish
It won't be a success until Local Storage isn't limited to 5MB. Right now
there's no way to "install" your game into a browser, which cripples WebGL's
ability to be a serious alternative to traditional PC-based gaming / mobile
gaming.

A single uncompressed 1024x1024 RGBA texture is 4MB, for example.

(I say all this not to be negative, but rather in hopes that the correct
developers will hear the plea from the indie game industry: enhance Local
Storage. We want to build games on your WebGL platform, but we can't until you
do.)

~~~
wladimir
True, 5MB limits you to pretty simple games :)

There are probably some other practical issues left to be resolved as well
before the browser is a mature cross-platform 3D gaming platform. But I can
certainly see things going that way.

~~~
windsurfer
I'm in the process of making a WebGL game - and oh yes, local storage is a
minor concern. Random slow downs, browser freezing, audio syncing, and
randomly incompatible hardware are only some of the problems I've been facing.

~~~
wladimir
_that_ wasn't much different with OpenGL in a Java applet, though... but yes
you'd hope this would be better

~~~
pavlov
Why would you hope that? Making another paper-thin wrapper over OpenGL means
inheriting its long-standing issues.

~~~
wladimir
A paper-thin wrapper around OpenGL is what the game-devs want. They don't want
to be straight-jacketed into one game or rendering engine.

Also, OpenGL isn't that low-level anymore. It is the API that the GPU speaks,
and with recent developments the client can be much less 'chatty'. Do as much
as possible from shaders and on the GPU itself. We've gone far beyond "do a
call per vertex".

As for hope, yes I have more "faith" in Google/Mozilla to improve cross-
platform javascript performance and memory issues than I have in Oracle or
Adobe to improve theirs.

