RSS FeedWebGL
Somehow this slipped under my radar. Apparently both Mozilla and Webkit have gained experimental support for WebGL. WebGL is going to expose OpenGL ES 2.0 (the same version of OpenGL you find in an iPhone) in JavaScript to be rendered inside a canvas tag. This is without a doubt, the most exciting thing to happen for web-based games ever. It ends up being a standards based, platform agnostic, hardware accelerated rendering method bundled as an extension to JavaScript, using a tag that is already part of the HTML 5 standard.
This is a huge piece of the puzzle that is going to allow the creation of web-based 3D games that can take advantage of hardware acceleration. So which pieces are missing? Not too many as it turns out. New implementations of JavaScript in both Firefox and Safari are very fast, making render loops and input capture entirely possible within the browser window. Video and audio have both got standards support in HTML 5. The only thing I can think of that’s missing is server initiated communication and peer to peer networking that would be necessary for real-time multiplayer games. Yeah you can poll a server making it possible to have multiplayer turn-based games or even real-time games where latency isn’t an issue. For 3D shooters and MMOs however, I would wager the networking piece is still mighty important.
Can’t wait to get my hands dirty with this stuff.
Tags: canvas, Games, html 5, javascript, opengl, webgl