So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different. Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser. WebGL is now an official standard being developed at Khronos Group to bring javascript control of OpenGL to browsers… Wow!
Ok so this was officially announced at the GDC in March but limited information, but now it has been slated for an official public standard in early 2010. Shortly after the announcement at the GDC we saw Google o3D appear doing exactly that, controlling OpenGL through Javascript in the browser but it was still largely software/harward hybrid rendered. Google, Mozilla, Opera are part of the companies supporting WebGL which is great for browser support, also NVIDIA, AMD and Ericsson are in on it.
Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet
JavaScript Binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 for Rich 3D Web Graphics without Browser Plugins; Wide industry Support from Major Browser Vendors including Google, Mozilla and Opera; Specification will be Available Royalty-free to all Developers
4th August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, today announced more details on its new WebGL™ working group for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Web pages without the need for browser plug-ins. First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera. The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards. The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs. WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010. Khronos warmly welcomes any interested company to become a member and participate in the development of the WebGL specification.
Google released O3D this year and there are great strides in 3d within the browser from game engine wrapper technologies such as instant action technology, gaim theory engine (now owned by id Software and runs Quake Live, hardware rendered Unity 3D (and Torque 3D coming soon), and Flash software rendered 3d engines Papervision 3D, Away 3D, Sandy (Sandy also released a haXe version that exports a javascript version) and others. But it looks like the movement is to bring OpenGL to the web as a standard under the name WebGL, this would be great! There would still be lots of times where plugins are better now and in the near future but the path is a good one. Having a software/hardware rendering hybrid like Google O3D for broad video card support (some of the painful older intel cards), or using a plugin like Unity3D, Torque 3D or wrapper technology for bigger engines is a good idea for the time being. But the future is grand in this area.
I think that Google O3D and OpenGL ES success on iPhone games probably combined to get this in motion. OpenGL and very basic video cards are now standard in most machines out there. Unity3D actually published hardware statistics on casual gamers (web-based games) ever so kindly and shows that even though there are some older Intel cards out there, for the most part machines nowadays have a video card capable of supporting at least low-poly 3d and hardware supported 2d rendering in real-time for games, user interfaces and more.
This is exciting news, it appears the movement of the web gaming market is getting much more capable and is accelerating the innovation of hardware accelerating the web.
Haxe Sandy is a version of Sandy that can export to an experimental Javascript 3D engine taking advantage of the <canvas> element. There are some great demos that run smoothly in canvas capable browsers and very smooth in Chrome.
Sandy was actually the first open source 3d engine in flash, maybe this will be a trend building in haXe for export to flash and javascript? It certainly looks like a great start and would make a very nice platform for 3d on the web allowing Sandy or other flash libraries to run in Flash and Javascript by writing in an abstraction platform like haXe. Other libraries like Motor2, Physaxe, haxe3D, PureMVC and more have haXe versions. Still very experimental but a possible need when Flash and canvas are both in the market in the future. Right now it is still all Flash.
Microsoft has released Silverlight 3 to the web a day earlier than expected. You can go ahead and grab Silverlight 3 RTW build 3.0.40624.0 (4.69MB) from Microsoft.com/Silverlight. Version 3 supports Windows Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, and Safari 3/4. In addition, the Silverlight 3 SDK (9.5MB) and the Silverlight 3 Tools (32.2MB) have been posted on the Microsoft Download Center. (arstechnica)
As Silverlight versions go it is quite impressive and pretty much a complete solution now including desktop save support and full set of tools for RIA development (early versions were only Javascript or had limited controls libraries).
Granted there are lots of years of gain that Flash has on Silverlight but the path that Silverlight it following leads right to Flash. Hopefully this will lead to more innovation on both sides (they might need it with Google Wave pushing html5 <canvas>).
One very nice element of Silverlight since it has been released at verison 1.0 is the HD video support. It has gotten better with each release. This release has smooth streaming support that is pretty impressive for web video.
Roy Schestowitz plays the flip side and calls this a ‘silver-lie’ released and has lots to say about the Silverlight 3 release and even using Big Buck Bunny to demo it. He states a true fact that up til now lots of companies have abandoned Silverlight in favor of Flash (mlb, nyt etc). It is still used at Netflix but that has an XBOX deal to play Netflixon xbox360.
Flash didn’t really get good until version 4. Typically software is a real version at version 3, that is when most software has the goals and ambitions of 1.0 fully complete and integrated. We shall see how things play out but I still think Silverlight has a long way to go in winning over developers, myself included, but competition is never a bad thing when you are wanting to see innovation.
Making things easier to produce and control with more simplified and minimal languages like Javascript, Python and Actionscript etc that control more complex systems, that typically you would need to invest more time in such as a platform on C++ is the goal. V8-GL has this goal in mind.
V8-GL from the author states:
V8-GL intends to provide a high-level JavaScript API for creating 2D/3D hardware accelerated desktop graphics.
In other words, you can hack some JavaScript code that opens a desktop window and renders some 3D hardware accelerated graphics. Bindings are made using the V8 JavaScript engine.
haXe is an interesting programming language that allows abstracting the source from platform target. It outputs for targets such as Actionscript and Javascript from haxe language source. But, haXe can also output to native code to run on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.
Well because of this it is possible to run haXe on the iPhone. The gamehaXe site has found a way to get haXe to compile to iPhone via hxcpp which creates a C++ output from haXe code very similar to Actionscript 3.
I am a bit late to the party but this is great news. It uses the NME library which will allows code to mostly be written to the Flash 9 API and create the C++ for XCode to compile and run on the iPhone and Touch. This creates a path to port Flash games to iPhone/Touch.
This project is one to watch and participate in. Native compilation to the iPhone from haXe is a more simplified code to write in while providing lower level performance which is needed on mobile devices, as processors, cache and ram are much lower than desktop and below what is capable of running the Flash AVM2 currently.
The hxcpp project is a newer output target along with a java one but this could be interesting if actionscript like code and many libraries like Physaxe or AS3 libraries could be ported to haXe to output to the iPhone.
With that, Flash 10 has many great new things such as the Vector structure that allows a collection of a certain type, which results in a faster collection because of the known type. So anywhere where Arrays are used, that is a possible candidate for a performance increase within some code because you are asking the virtual machine to do less work on each loop (not having to dynamically find out the type).
ByteArray (Thibault Imbert) has demonstrated that for the JPEG encoding in corelib it is up to 2.5 times faster using Vectors than Arrays. Your mileage may vary heavily but it is almost a guaranteed speed boost due to less work. This obviously has great possibilities for speeding up code that uses lots of arrays.
Due to the performance boost the Vector does have some constraints in the typical give and take of coder flexibility with compiler and virtual machine overhead. Vectors are more explicit and strongly typed which is why they are fast, but this is also limiting.
In addition to the data type restriction, the Vector class has other restrictions that distinguish it from the Array class:
A Vector is a dense array. Unlike an Array, which may have values in indices 0 and 7 even if there are no values in positions 1 through 6, a Vector must have a value (or null) in each index.
A Vector can optionally be fixed-length, meaning the number of elements it contains can’t change.
Access to a Vector’s elements is bounds-checked. You can never read a value from an index greater than the final element (length - 1). You can never set a value with an index more than one beyond the current final index (in other words, you can only set a value at an existing index or at index [length]).
I updated to iPhone SDK 3 beta 4 and iPhone OS 3 beta 4 and the latest Unity iPhone and things were much better in perception of speed at least in early testing. Not sure if it was more from one or the other but the games I am testing/building so far are quicker and the OS feels faster overall.
This build fixes many issues and makes some great optimizations for speed as listed here:
New Features and Improvements
Reduced memory footprint for uncompressed audio by 50%
“Memory usage for textures reduced by 50%. Texture memory is now freed once it has been submitted to OpenGLES on the device. The “Enable Get/SetPixels” flag in the Texture Import Settings lets you disable this feature on a per texture basis in order to access the texture data from a script using GetPixel etc.
Improved iPhone script call optimization
Removed unused parts of Mono runtime
Reduced memory overhead while reading data from disk and slightly improved load times.
Support for several predefined splash-screens (portrait/landscape) for Indie version. Just rename one of the splash-screens in the output directory to Default.png
Exported audio session activation/deactivation functions to AppController.mm
Added Scripting Reference code examples for iPhone specific APIs
Bug Fixes
Fixed audio to play correctly after phone call / text message / alarm interruption occurs
Fixed compressed audio occasionally refusing to play
Fixed AudioSource.PlayOneShot to work correctly with compressed audio
Fixed audio to respect Mute switch and background iPod music
Fixed Pause function and time property for compressed audio clips
Fixed OpenAL memory leak
Fixed PhysX memory leaks
Fixed Audio and Animation assets leaking while loading new scene
Fixed a crash related to playing compressed audio in a sequence
Fixed memory leak while updating Mesh geometry data
Fixed several small memory leaks in rendering module
Fixed asynchronous .NET sockets
Fixed .NET threads
Fixed cross thread boundary calling to the delegates
The site mentions that OpenGL source can be converted to run in the engine. You can do this now with Alchemy although it is in very early stages. It is not clear if it is an automatic conversion or if it simply means it is similar in syntax and method signatures, objects etc.
I definitely will be watching and see how it progresses, there isn’t much other than a single post about the engine so far and no info on the api or sample code. Looking forward to seeing more, the z-sorting is quite nice. Doesn’t appear like collisions are there yet but it has a nice look.
Sometimes excellent toolkits come out of the blue like this such as Ffilmation (isometric flash engine) or Alternativa (flash 3d engine flash 10 focused) so you never know.
It is easy to see how the latest version of JiglibFlash with MouseConstraint will be heavily influencing flash games and applications very soon. This is a very smooth and quick demo that feels very responsive on the controls. There are so many possible uses for JiglibFlash now that the MouseConstraint is available. It will evolve further but this version seems ready to start integrating into many flash game and interactive ideas and projects. Even though it is still alpha it has been heavily cleaned up and a plugin system added by bartek for pluggable 3d render engines. That is a huge step for 3d pipelines in flash.
Google has a few things going for 3d in the browser, not just 3d but hardware rendering in the browser. They previously had native client which allows you to run code via a plugin proxy with a sample running Quake. They also had Lively which was a virtual world plugin that was shut down a few month after it started.
This won’t change anything now as Unity3D, Flash 3D pseudo engines, even Director 3D still are the top choices for games, apps, and interactives that need effects and possibly hardware rendering. But it is interesting that Google is essentially re-entering this debate after ditching on Lively and they must see some benefit to having a discussion about 3d on the web and 3d standards in general. I know they have lots of models and tools with SketchUp and Google 3D warehouse so who knows maybe they will take it over by being standards, open and information based.
What is O3D?
O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser. This API is shared at an early stage as part of a conversation with the broader developer community about establishing an open web standard for 3D graphics.
Get involved
Download the plug-in (Windows and Mac) and explore the samples to see O3D’s capabilities. Linux users, see these instructions.
One thing is for sure, 3d development is still old school proprietary lock in in most cases. Working with 3d and tools like Maya, 3dsmax and others they have always been very non standard. From file formats to interfaces to even basic movements, all different. The general maths of 3d are the same and so should 3d pipelines. Formats like COLLADA are nice because they are starting to open up 3d pipelines and content creation but COLLADA still has many porting issues. FBX file format is another that is really useful and common making pipelines in Unity 3D, for instance, very nice. But it is owned and run by Autodesk who owns all the 3d apps (Maya, 3dsmax, SGI) and I am a bit leary of that method. But in the end 3d pipelines and rendering will be somewhat standardized and maybe the web will be hardware rendered one day. In most cases it is not needed, but for gaming, immersion, demos and other entertainment it could benefit heavily from a more standardized 3d pipeline and methods.
So many cool and useful technologies are unveiled at SIGGRAPH every year, this year at SIGGRAPH 2009 was no different. Khronos Group, behind the new guidance of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, OpenVG, COLLADA etc, came another big announcement about hardware rendering within the browser. WebGL is now an official standard being developed at Khronos Group to bring javascript control of OpenGL to browsers… Wow!Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet
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