Yet another cool WebGL demo

Karlos

Karlos

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Take a basic elevation map and add controls for adding/removing rock, soil, water under the cursor in realtime, bound by some fluid modelling/erosion behaviour and hey presto, you can create your very own landscapes with lakes, rivers etc.

A bit like Vista, only realtime (and without vegetation) and with weathering...

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/craftscape/?f=webgl

You need a browser that properly supports WebGL (obviously) :)
 
Very cool.

I still won't run Chrome on this system though, will wait until Opera supports it (it does for windows already)
 
Whoops, shit happens.​

water/display.shader: program link: undefined: Shader@0x05564610(209,9): warning X3206: implicit truncation of vector type Shader@0x05564610(182,21): warning X3571: pow(f, e) will not work for negative f, use abs(f) or conditionally handle negative values if you expect them Vertex shader sampler count exceeds MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS (4).

Both in Firefox as well with Chrome in Windows 7 with a radeon hd 5570
 
Speelgoedmannetje said:
Whoops, shit happens.​

water/display.shader: program link: undefined: Shader@0x05564610(209,9): warning X3206: implicit truncation of vector type Shader@0x05564610(182,21): warning X3571: pow(f, e) will not work for negative f, use abs(f) or conditionally handle negative values if you expect them Vertex shader sampler count exceeds MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS (4).

Both in Firefox as well with Chrome in Windows 7 with a radeon hd 5570
Click to expand...

Right browser, wrong OS. Doesn't work in Windows for me, either, but is fine in Linux.
 
Yep. Same bug here with Windows 7. Don't have a Linux partition, yet. Just assembled this particular PC yesterday. :p
 
Actually, I had problems with my linux machine at work too, it uses a RadeonHD 5770 with ATI's proprietary drivers. The only properly working combination I've found for WebGL so far is Linux + nVidia with nVidia's own drivers.
 
Yea, I suspected that also, and I thought about buying one instead of this ati card, as nvidia cards are better supported on Linux, but this card was nicely silent.
 
not working on my Ubuntu - tried Opera and FF.

looks nice, tho
 
WebGL on Firefox needs to be specifically enabled as far as I know. I'm not sure if it is supported in Opera at all.
 
This one is very nice too:
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/webgl-water-simulation/?f=

Real-time water heightfield simulation with raytraced reflection, refraction, soft shadows, caustics and ambient occlusion. From what I can tell, the GL extension requirements for this are supported only by chrome, so there's no point even trying it in another browser. Runs very smooth here.
 
WebGL is supported on Windows in the Opera 11 preview build. Support for other operating systems is underway
Click to expand...
so, eventually...........
 
So far, I've found chrome to be the best browser for this. I've gotten firefox working with most of them now too. For those demos which are mostly GPU bound, there's not much difference between them, but wherever there is some heavy lifting to do in JS, chrome leaves it (and pretty much everything else) for dust.
 
ilwrath said:
Yep. Same bug here with Windows 7. Don't have a Linux partition, yet. Just assembled this particular PC yesterday. :p
Click to expand...
Works for me in FF in Win7.

FF go to about:config set webgl.prefer-native true and webgl.force-enabled true

However, FF's WebGL is slow compared with Opera and Chrome, but it works for now.
 
I'll wait until it works on the Amiga browsers. :)
 
Glaucus said:
I'll wait until it works on the Amiga browsers. :)
Click to expand...
I'll just wait. I can't see the point in getting excited about this stuff any more. It's the de-democratization of computers - making them all dependent on other people's servers. Used to be when some software company went tits up at least you could still use the software because you had it. You could even give it to someone else. Now if a company dies (or just their server dies - or gets blocked by the government) then all their apps and all your data you store with them just goes away. *poof*
And when they add a "feature" like activity logging or remove a feature like saving a backup copy of your work to your own server of choice then you don't get to run the older version any more.

For all the hype and "you are always at the latest version" crap, all it's really for is to do stuff you used to do but to be able to monetize every transaction and make sure no-one can use an app without authorization. Screw the central server, I want my autonomy.
 
I see what you're saying and for the most part I totally agree. I too have a natural resistance to the concept of cloud computing. But I can also see arguments for it as well. Look at a place like AppHarbor. They run the server, you provide the code. And the code is C# or some other standard that you COULD host on any other site if their site fails. This way it's your business logic, your code and your data and you can migrate it as you please. Migration is a big part of that. I think that's great for small businesses as you don't need to worry about servers and security and yet you can run a global app very easily. You could, for example, use this as a backend for a small mobile app. I was at a conference this week and one of the guys presenting was part of a team that bult an iPhone/WindowsPhone7/Android game called Own This World and they use AppHarbor to run the game - the phones are basically dumb terminals. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. If AppHarbor goes down they can move their site somewhere else (or host it themselves), update the DNS entry and all is good.

But yes, we are quickly moving towards the day when we don't own software but rent it. The plus side is that we're also moving towards better standards. Does it matter if your cloud product no longer exists so long as you can use your data with another cloud product? Or you can use the Cloud to supplement local storage - you can now import/export MS Word documents into Google Docs and edit them. Just look at Whyzzat - Wayne upgraded the forum software a number of times but we're all still here and even all our old threads are preserved. Does it matter that we switched platforms? I don't think so.

And back to your point. It's true what you say about companies going tits up. I still own my Amiga 4000 and disks full of software. But do I use it? Never. I know your point is that you should have access to what you have bought indefinitely and I agree with that. But at the same time I think most people would never notice or care if their old software suddenly stopped working. And in many cases old software stops working anyway due to updates in operating systems or hardware. Sticking to a specific piece of hardware/software for a prolonged time frame is just not very feasible or realistic. My old work place used a machine with an ATA slot which had a special expansion card on it that was used to digitally encrypt parts of the software for security reasons (it would create physical dongles). We had only one machine in the entire company with an ATA slot. The product was no longer supported by the manufacturer. If that machine experienced a hardware failure my old company would be forced to upgrade their solution just the same. There's no way they could expect it to last for ever, even if they had 10 backup systems in a closet somewhere. Constant incremental upgrades and changes are what's needed, not big massive overhauls every 10 or 15 years.
 
Vecanti said:
Works for me in FF in Win7.

FF go to about:config set webgl.prefer-native true and webgl.force-enabled true

However, FF's WebGL is slow compared with Opera and Chrome, but it works for now.
Click to expand...
Thanks! Now it works as well on my system on firefox (couldn't find yet how to get it work in the other browsers)
 
cecilia said:
I never use IE so I really don't care if that thing ever supports WebGL

I'm selfish like that :D
Click to expand...
I'm as well as selfish, but alas, I now and then also develop applications with a web interface. Which needs to run in IE. Oh how many times I asked my boss to drop IE support completely, except for showing a screen that enables the user to download any other decent web browser.
 
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