Epic and Mozilla Bring HTML5 OpenGL Demo To the Browser 77
sl4shd0rk writes "Mozilla and Epic (of Epic Megagames fame) have engineered an impressive First Person OpenGL demo which runs on HTML5 and a subset of JavaScript. Emscripten, the tool used, converts C and C++ code into 'low level' JavaScript. According to Epic, The Citadel demo runs 'within 2x of native speeds' and supports features commonly found in native OpenGL games such as dynamic specular lighting and global illumination. This concept was previously covered on Slashdot, however the Citadel demo has just been released this week."
Re:Browser Not Supported (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML5 is trying to be the next Java, substituting the browser in place of the JVM. This is a logical extension to the past decade of offloading all the heavy processing to the web browser.
Yes, the client is much faster and more powerful than what the server could provide for each individual connected client. But at the same time, the implementation differences between browsers, platforms, and even browser versions will still result in the same or worse incompatiblities than before.
Re:Browser Not Supported (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm having trouble getting too worked up about a tech demo showing off a 10x performance improvement in the nightly over the stable version not working in the stable version.
Yes, new ideas will get implemented differently and at different rates, but Mozilla and Google are working hard to make sure the final versions of things get standardized and work cross-browser as it is in both of their interests (Apple and Microsoft both have some amount of interest in the web working poorly so people use native apps instead). Most importantly, Mozilla and Google have recently moved to disabling non-standardized features by default, so there is less temptation for developers to try to use non-standard features (e.g. not doing the CSS-prefixing thing anymore in favor of making it a configuration option that's disabled by default).
Re:Plain Crap (Score:0, Insightful)
So it's a ‘subset’ of JavaScript but for it to be useful (or in this case, work at all) you need to have extensions in your browser so it actually isn't even a superset - it's a completely different language. Also on the surface it looks like the only place where HTML is involved is to provide a place to put the OpenGL graphics. And obviously it won't run near twice native speeds but (if you have a special browser) near half native speeds.
So almost every sentence in the summary is wrong, to create a picture of this wonderful thing that can be done within web standards, whereas almost the complete opposite is true. You need a special browser for this and even then performance is shitty.