Mozilla Develops Gladius 3D Game Engine 112
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla is developing its own 3D engine called Gladius as part of a wider Paladin project whose aim it is to bring 3D to the web. As all programmers know, the best way to learn is to experiment, and that's exactly what Mozilla is doing. In order to develop Gladius the team decided to create a game called RescueFox (best played in Firefox). It's a very basic prototype, and Mozilla has no interest in taking it further, but the purpose it served was to highlight what still needs to be done to make Gladius a solid web browser 3D engine solution."
Re:Oh goodie... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just what we need... an annoying technology that manufacturers can use to try to convince us to "upgrade" all of our laptops and monitors.
Yeah, I wish there were more stories on Slashdot about how to live in harmony with nature away from all the trappings of modern society. I don't come here for all this news about "upgrades" and "technology" and stuff.
Re:cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Pfft. Stability? Easy deployability? Who needs that stuff? Mozilla's target audience isn't the enterprise or the home. It's a magical land of make believe.
Re:Plugins are the best at this time (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you seen the Firefox demo's when Firefox 4 came out? All 3D rendered with webgl. Accelerated html 5 is coming and has many uses. I already see the HP add in 3D on slashdot if I use Firefox or IE 9. It is not in Chrome yet as the canvas is not accelerated by default yet.
With decent integrated GPUs that actually do not suck in AMDs and now Intels latest offerings it is certainly doable and coming. MS has demos including a game of scrabble [microsoft.com]. Mostly 3D is for games, children love Flash games these days and that is turning to HTML 5 as I type this.
In 2 years it will be quite mainstream. My guess is even less. Browsers are being updated very quickly now and even IE now has an annual update. Since IE follows standards in the later releases, many businesses can upgrade with ease annually once their crappy IE 6 intranet sites are updated.
True World of Warcraft in HTML 5 with CSS 3D is not going to happen anytime soon, but many games already do advanced mmos in javascript that are impressive. We will see but my guess is it will be here sooner than you think.
Just following in chrome's footsteps... (Score:2, Insightful)
It started with the UI... eliminating status bars and minimizing the ui to an extreme.
Then they changed the numbering on releases.
Now they are copying the game engine. (another feature that chrome already has)
Why innovate for yourselves if you can just copy everything that chrome has done already?!?
Of course copying Chrome is counter-productive... If I want my browser to be like Chrome I am going to use Chrome. Hey mozilla team: If you want people to use your browser you have to innovate on your own and give people reasons why your browser is better. Ask any sled dog, the one that leads has a much better view than the ones that follow the leader.
You(mozilla) started to lead when everyone else thought the browser market was dead. You rapidly gained market share and people started using Firefox. However this year you appear to have no drive, leadership or innovation and people are starting to leave your browser for others. How difficult is it for you to get the clue to start your own ideas instead of copying someone else?
Re:Just following in chrome's footsteps... (Score:1, Insightful)
The UI was minimized because of netbooks, not because of Chrome.
Numbering is artificial and of little significance. Mozilla's plan is to eventually remove it entirely.
It seems you're confusing a javascript game engine that uses the WebGL API and the WebGL API itself? All major browsers are implementing WebGL which allows browsers to render 3D. The article is about a javascript game engine that uses WebGL and will run on any WebGL capable browser. Many people will be writing javascript/WebGL game engines and all major browsers support both, so I'm not sure what you think Mozilla is copying but they're not.