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Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

exophysics.net

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Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#21

Post by hut0 »

nlh wrote: post #4

None seem to work on Safari 14.0.01 :/ Not sure if I need to enable anything for WebGL. On vanilla Chrome 87, I get "Unable to initialize the shader program: Vertex shader active uniforms exceed GL_MAX_VERTEX_UNIFORM_VECTORS(256)" for most of them. But a few work (swyrlyx.html) and are super cool! Nicely done.

It's a pity that Safari is a little slow to implement WebGL2. Your message on chrome though sounds like a legit bug, since normally, Exophysics reduces the number of particles to match the hardware/browser capabilities, and here they're exceeded. Will investigate.

Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#22

Post by hut0 »

andai wrote: post #16
hut0 wrote: post #2

Hey people, I built this particle simulator in ~500 lines of self-contained HTML/JS/WebGL2. It's designed to encourage creativity and exploration. You can just download one of those universes and open up the HTML file in a text editor to tweak the physical laws and constants. Then open it up in your browser to see the result immediately. I had a lot of fun exploring the beautiful emergent behaviors that arise from th…

Nice, this is really fun to play with! I messed around with something similar a few years ago, based on (the code in) this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_zmZ23grXE Edit: Apparently there are a lot of these! This variant is also pretty cool (smaller particles, more like "fields"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu5aDIEoBk0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=makaJpLvbow <- this one is pretty awesome too. A very simple rule and quite the complex behavior. Though I'd recommend watching it at 175% speed, muted, and perhaps with the 1812 Overture as the background music.

Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#23

Post by user-the-name »

hut0 wrote: post #21
nlh wrote: post #4

None seem to work on Safari 14.0.01 :/ Not sure if I need to enable anything for WebGL. On vanilla Chrome 87, I get "Unable to initialize the shader program: Vertex shader active uniforms exceed GL_MAX_VERTEX_UNIFORM_VECTORS(256)" for most of them. But a few work (swyrlyx.html) and are super cool! Nicely done.

It's a pity that Safari is a little slow to implement WebGL2. Your message on chrome though sounds like a legit bug, since normally, Exophysics reduces the number of particles to match the hardware/browser capabilities, and here they're exceeded. Will investigate.

Safari 14 has WebGL 2, it just has to be turned on in the Develop menu first.

Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#24

Post by morphle »

hut0 wrote: post #2

Hey people, I built this particle simulator in ~500 lines of self-contained HTML/JS/WebGL2. It's designed to encourage creativity and exploration. You can just download one of those universes and open up the HTML file in a text editor to tweak the physical laws and constants. Then open it up in your browser to see the result immediately. I had a lot of fun exploring the beautiful emergent behaviors that arise from th…

I like this programming languages made for particle/fields [1,2,3]

Yoshiki Ohshima also made the particle/fields simulator in Squeak/Etoys that Alan Kay demos is his talks [5] and was a scientist at Alan Kay's VPRI [4].

[1] http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/shadama2/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/search?query=sha...

[3] http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/shadama2/live2017/#kedama

[4] http://www.vpri.org/writings.php

[5] https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#25

Post by hut0 »

morphle wrote: post #24
hut0 wrote: post #2

Hey people, I built this particle simulator in ~500 lines of self-contained HTML/JS/WebGL2. It's designed to encourage creativity and exploration. You can just download one of those universes and open up the HTML file in a text editor to tweak the physical laws and constants. Then open it up in your browser to see the result immediately. I had a lot of fun exploring the beautiful emergent behaviors that arise from th…

I like this programming languages made for particle/fields [1,2,3] Yoshiki Ohshima also made the particle/fields simulator in Squeak/Etoys that Alan Kay demos is his talks [5] and was a scientist at Alan Kay's VPRI [4]. [1] http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/shadama2/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/search?query=sha... [3] http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/shadama2/live2017/#kedama [4] http://www.vpri.org/writ…

Wasn't aware of this project, thanks for the links!

Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#27

Post by pjmlp »

expenses2 wrote: post #26

I thought that WebGL2 didn't have compute shaders. How are you doing this without them?

You can fake it by misusing textures.

Actually there is a compute shaders extension, but it is only available in certain drivers configurations in Firefox.

Chrome only plans to support WebGPU.

Re: Show HN: Exophysics – WebGL2 particle simulator

#28

Post by hut0 »

expenses2 wrote: post #26

I thought that WebGL2 didn't have compute shaders. How are you doing this without them?

I use transform feedback, which allows vertex shaders to send data back to the application. You could do this with textures as well, as described by pjmlp. I did this in an earlier version (https://github.com/hut/cellmade#) but it just felt SO WRONG. I was very happy that I found out about transform feedback to be able to do it more cleanly.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGLTransf...

> The WebGLTransformFeedback interface is part of the WebGL 2 API and enables transform feedback, which is the process of capturing primitives generated by vertex processing. It allows to preserve the post-transform rendering state of an object and resubmit this data multiple times.

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