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WebGL Support Begins to Arrive in WebKit
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no better time for flash developers like myself to start learning OpenGL... it was already on my list, but this news pushes it to the top.
The latest nightly builds of Chromium are just as amazingly fast and stable as Safari in SL. Issues with smooth scrolling and flash have all been resolved. It's FAST.
Not quite, VRML has no access to any hardware acceleration provided by the platform.
Cool. That means it will run on iPod Touch 2009 32/64 as updates and software propagate.
After it is debugged on iPod Touch 2009 32/64, we can expect to see it run through the Apple hardware lines.
So now we can use even more of the graphics hardware for decoding and encoding tasks.
Rocketman
After it is debugged on iPod Touch 2009 32/64, we can expect to see it run through the Apple hardware lines.
So now we can use even more of the graphics hardware for decoding and encoding tasks.
Rocketman
Down with Flash up with Actionscript?
As a sometimes Flash developer I am conflicted about the Flash Plugin... There have been so many advances in the Actionscript language in the last few years. Papervision 3D was a huge deal but Pixel Bender is even bigger... if you don't know what I'm talking about - well Pixel Bender lets you create interactive live filters ala Photoshop's filters which means things like live distortions, live painter effects, etc.
So my point is that yes it's great to get an open standard that is working towards this same set of features, including hardware accelerated video and 3D - but it's also a major setback in terms of developing for these features. Developers will have to re-learn and re-develop all of the solutions they've created for Flash... yes some will be ports from Actionscript to Javascript but others will have to be written from the ground up.
Things like animating sound for instance. In Flash/Actionscript you can use code to 'attach' a sound to an object in 3D space and make the sound source itself pan and zoom like any other object (adjusting it's volume and stereo output to make it seem to be coming from the source's location). Use a filter on the sound and you can distort it as well so that the sound seems to 'wiggle' or 'blur' for instance.
For 3D objects, Papervision has support for things like inverse kinematics where you define a range of motion for a piece of a 3D composition so that it can only move relative to it's parent 3D object and only in certain directions... combine this with a good physics engine and you can achieve realistic interactive animations of real world objects and characters. Building support for this into OpenGL is going to be *not easy*. 3D is one thing but compositional, controllable, animated 3D is something entirely different.
Like I said, hopefully the developers working on all these great solutions for Flash will take up the gauntlet and port their work over to Javascript and discover support for the Canvas object and it's access to OpenGL, Audio and Video and then add in support for particle engines, physics engines and all the other nifty tools that Flash developers have access to (some of this is already done actually).
Like I said, I'm conflicted.
As a sometimes Flash developer I am conflicted about the Flash Plugin... There have been so many advances in the Actionscript language in the last few years. Papervision 3D was a huge deal but Pixel Bender is even bigger... if you don't know what I'm talking about - well Pixel Bender lets you create interactive live filters ala Photoshop's filters which means things like live distortions, live painter effects, etc.
So my point is that yes it's great to get an open standard that is working towards this same set of features, including hardware accelerated video and 3D - but it's also a major setback in terms of developing for these features. Developers will have to re-learn and re-develop all of the solutions they've created for Flash... yes some will be ports from Actionscript to Javascript but others will have to be written from the ground up.
Things like animating sound for instance. In Flash/Actionscript you can use code to 'attach' a sound to an object in 3D space and make the sound source itself pan and zoom like any other object (adjusting it's volume and stereo output to make it seem to be coming from the source's location). Use a filter on the sound and you can distort it as well so that the sound seems to 'wiggle' or 'blur' for instance.
For 3D objects, Papervision has support for things like inverse kinematics where you define a range of motion for a piece of a 3D composition so that it can only move relative to it's parent 3D object and only in certain directions... combine this with a good physics engine and you can achieve realistic interactive animations of real world objects and characters. Building support for this into OpenGL is going to be *not easy*. 3D is one thing but compositional, controllable, animated 3D is something entirely different.
Like I said, hopefully the developers working on all these great solutions for Flash will take up the gauntlet and port their work over to Javascript and discover support for the Canvas object and it's access to OpenGL, Audio and Video and then add in support for particle engines, physics engines and all the other nifty tools that Flash developers have access to (some of this is already done actually).
Like I said, I'm conflicted.
IE's going to be very easy to crack if they don't improve their pace of improvement. Browser progress has hit a break-neck pace in the last year or two. The new features appearing in everything except IE are going to be a big draw to developers. And Ballmer always says it best.
Great. Then Adobe should freeware and open source the player for that content. The business model works with Acrobat. Otherwise ****.
Rocketman
Die!!!!!
Die flash die, I hate adobe and its crappy bloody flash so much. I cant wait for it to be replaced. Im sure the misery that flash causes is actually in article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Die flash die, I hate adobe and its crappy bloody flash so much. I cant wait for it to be replaced. Im sure the misery that flash causes is actually in article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
This is a really good thing for us developers now that its becoming a standard.
A friend of mine (a flash developer) had tried to show web based game sites such as Blurst to his colleagues and they refused to install the unity plugin even if it took a couple of seconds. I found a free alternative, Google's O3D api (javascript for OpenGL) and was amazed by what it can do. But then again you have to force users to install O3D plugin, which in their mentality is a no no. So we fell back to the most common installed plugin, Flash. My friend said Papervision 3D is now the best way to deliver interactive 3D content without any hassles. But I hated flash in general, the fact that it was a cpu hog especially displaying 3d content. WebGL is going to be my 3d platform for now on for the fact that it will be built in and as a standard.
A friend of mine (a flash developer) had tried to show web based game sites such as Blurst to his colleagues and they refused to install the unity plugin even if it took a couple of seconds. I found a free alternative, Google's O3D api (javascript for OpenGL) and was amazed by what it can do. But then again you have to force users to install O3D plugin, which in their mentality is a no no. So we fell back to the most common installed plugin, Flash. My friend said Papervision 3D is now the best way to deliver interactive 3D content without any hassles. But I hated flash in general, the fact that it was a cpu hog especially displaying 3d content. WebGL is going to be my 3d platform for now on for the fact that it will be built in and as a standard.
The functionality, perhaps only partially implemented, appeared in this evenings WebKit nightly build.