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.

This is a very cool project called V8-GL.  It is an OpenGL engine with 80% of the API converted to run on the V8 Javascript engine, the same engine that runs Google Chrome.

This is exciting as more productive languages like Javascript get speed boosts from engines like V8 and are capable of manipulating more complex systems like OpenGL.  Google is also pursing this in the browser with O3D with javascript manipulation of hardware rendering.  Also, a Google funded project called Unladen Swallow is converting Python to the LLVM virtual machine, so that it can have increasing speeds to compete with gcc speeds.

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.

• V8-GL blog post
• V8-GL source on Github
• Also check out the SpiderMonkey jslibs project with other javascript wrappers for libraries like ode, sdl and more using the engine by Mozilla.

Unity 3D iPhone was updated recently to 1.0.2 and it has been greatly improved in performance and a much more solid 1.0 toolkit.  According to Unity 3D information by up to 50% which means much more room for assets to munch memory for us yay!

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.

Get the latest Unity 3d iPhone dev kit (only for Mac OSX obviously since it uses XCode to compile per Apple licensing requirements)

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
• Fixed UnityEngine.TextEditor stripping
• Fixed GUI slider stripping
• Fixed GUI scroll view stripping
• Fixed IndexOutOfRange exception checking
• Fixed Boo.Lang.dll stripping
• Fixed occasional crashes of AOT cross compiler

Yogurt3D flash based 3d engine appeared recently and is another flash based 3d engine which is based on OpenGL called SwiftGL and is stated as open source.

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.