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Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

demoseen.com

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#21
post #7

Very neat. I'm happy to see that the demo scene magic still exists. I thought the days of seeing an animated ray traced scene from a 256 byte EXE were over. This runs fluidly on my Chrome/Sandy Bridge/Ubuntu setup.

I like the demo on the "front page", as well: http://demoseen.com/ It crashes though, when you run it with this hash: 0FP$9jj!i1!!!DPD!t!!!!!~ It spun up 5M threads before it died, which was admittedly fun to watch.

There are a dozen or so different demos and experiments sitting on the site now, but no way to get to any of it, so the front page is soon to be a demo in itself, with the others nested inside it. A nice little interactive portfolio. But I'm glad you dig the langton hack

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#23
post #14

Heh. Screen went black for a while, after which: "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." Using an old NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with driver 8.17.12.7533 on a 32-bit Windows Vista SP2, browser was Google Chrome 12.0.742.122.

It's fairly GPU intensive, and if Windows Vista/7 don't get a response from the GPU after a short period of time, it'll restart the drivers. Happens every once in a while even on newer GPUs, unfortunately.

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#24
post #23
post #14

Heh. Screen went black for a while, after which: "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." Using an old NVIDIA GeForce 6200 with driver 8.17.12.7533 on a 32-bit Windows Vista SP2, browser was Google Chrome 12.0.742.122.

It's fairly GPU intensive, and if Windows Vista/7 don't get a response from the GPU after a short period of time, it'll restart the drivers. Happens every once in a while even on newer GPUs, unfortunately.

Ah. So your interpretation is not that the driver actually crashed, but that it simply was overwhelmed by the workload, and didn't respond properly within the timeout limit as set by the OS?

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#25
post #18
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. You have a js error somewhere: Uncaught ReferenceError: S is not defined

That's not a JS error. 'S' is a function defined in WebGL, which gets pulled out and names are passed through a regex that filters out certain characters. So it's not getting a WebGL context, and thus that function never ends up being pulled into the global namespace.

For whatever it's worth, I'm on the same build of Chrome (12.0.742.122) on OSX 10.6.8 and the demo is working fine for me.

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot, although all of the demos I've tried here work: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Demo_Repository

Only thing I can think of at this point is that you have an extension inserting something into the body before the canvas. While on Magister, drop javascript:alert(document.body.firstChild) into the address bar and see if you get the canvas -- if not, that's the problem.

The tab crashes after a while when I try that. Weird. Even with all extensions disabled, it hangs without ever finishing loading.

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot, although all of the demos I've tried here work: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Demo_Repository

Only thing I can think of at this point is that you have an extension inserting something into the body before the canvas. While on Magister, drop javascript:alert(document.body.firstChild) into the address bar and see if you get the canvas -- if not, that's the problem.

It does not work for me either - blank white screen. Same setup, Mac OS X and Chrome. I do get the canvas when pasting that snippet, though.

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#29
post #11

Apologies, but nothing happens when I view it. Running Chrome 12.0.742.122. I see the initial raw PNG splat, but get nothing but a lot of high cpu and a blank browser screen after running a couple minutes.

To see if WebGL is enabled you can type this in the address bar

  about:gpu
Also helpful

  about:flags

Re: Show HN: My first WebGL demo, the first self-extracting PNG ever?

#30
So, it the header makes it look like a PNG:

    magister.html: PNG image data, 1242 x 1, 8-bit grayscale, non-interlaced
If you look at this in an image viewer, it's as advertised: a long black bar.

So what this is is some garbage data with a PNG header, a token PNG image, and some HTML that bootstraps a javascript program whose main body looks like binary garbage. But it's not a self-extracting PNG, it's a very strange HTML document with a PNG header.

That's not to say it's not impressive, but the running demo looks nothing like the PNG data.

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