Learning WebGL

It’s been a busy week!

Very very cool indeed: from Evgeny Demidov, Conway’s game of life on the GPU using WebGL. On his main WebGL page you can also see he’s taken the Mandelbrot demo we saw a while back even further. Impressive stuff!
Big news for Paul Brunt’s GLGE: it now supports particle systems, [...]

Just three new links for today:

Ken Russell has added a page to the WebGL Wiki with details of the differences between WebGL and “normal” OpenGL texture support beyond those I reported the other day — in particular, non-power-of-two textures can not only cause problems in the shaders, they can also stop the gl.generateMipmaps function from [...]

LearningWebGL.com is a technical blog, so I hesitate to post about something purely personal, but in an emergency, things look different… my wife, AI guru Lola Canamero, and a number of her students, are stuck in Venice right now after a conference, with no transport out of town, and everyone’s desperate to get home to [...]

Don’t worry, the lessons will continue shortly! Things have been a little hectic with my day job recently, but I hope to be able to write up lesson 16 over the weekend.
In the meantime, some bugfixes to the older lessons, in particular those after lesson 11:

Chromium expert Ken Russell writes to point out that [...]

Some interesting framework news, and more!

Some big news I didn’t spot back in late March: X3DOM is at version 1.0! X3DOM is a a WebGL-based implementation of X3D, which in turn is a way of describing 3D scenes using a declarative language based on HTML. The team behind it have also put together [...]

Henrik Bennetsen of Katalabs has created a mailing list for WebGL developers.
Some investigative journalism from Stephen Shankland: it does seem plausible that Google are reinventing O3D as a WebGL framework.
A heads-up for anyone using point sprites: OpenGL ES 2.0 does not require implementations to support points larger than one pixel, and so WebGL might follow [...]

Well, I don’t think I’m scooping anyone on this As everyone reading this doubtless already knows, the Google Web Toolkit team have announced that they’re ported Quake II to HTML5, using WebGL for the rendering, Web Sockets for the client-server communication, and HTML5 Audio for the sound. They don’t have a [...]

I found myself at home unexpectedly this evening, so what better way to pass the time than learning about particle effects? These are what you use to show explosions, flames, smoke, and other useful things; Google have put together an excellent WebGL demo (actually ported over from O3D) showing a number of different things [...]

Just a few for today:

Well, I’d been looking forward to seeing WebGL support in Opera, but it looks like they’re taking the canvas element in a different direction (h/t Stephen Shankland).
I’d not seen this one before: a Google Maps/WebGL mash-up from the C3DL guys. Enter your route’s start and end points, hit “Go”, and [...]