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Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

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Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#21

Post by robterrell »

tyho wrote: post #3
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Ugh: 'we developed a patent-pending solution called “ZyGL”.' While there are a bunch of people working to make stuff performant on browsers, Zynga comes in from behind and starts patenting barely-novel stuff on top of it.

Relevant patent I think: https://www.google.com/patents/US20130088491 If the emscripten lot had decided to patent "Method to reconstruct flow structures from binary machine code" then Zynga would not have the privilege of porting their game to the web in the first place.

Actually, that's not the relevant patent. That patent is for a technique for hardware-accelerated 2D animations using 3D meshes on the GPU, and was used for the game Dream Zoo.

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#22

Post by kazinator »

Alupis wrote: post #12
kazinator wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; please join the "Ask Patents" stackexchange site: http://patents.stackexchange.com/ This site is exactly for this reason: raising patent questions with the goal of identifying bad patents. "Ask Patents is a question and answer site for people interested in improving and participating in the US patent system. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're worki…

It's been said before, but I'll say it again: The USPTO does not and will not look at nor use an end-user forums like "Ask Patents" for the basis of any decision.

Your comments may be true about most end-user forums, but it seems that "Ask Patents" really is different.

Firstly, from the help page:

"Ask Patents blocks dangerous applications by alerting the US Patent Examiner of record when good Prior Art is found for an application that he or she is examining."

Secondly, the site contains examples of patents that were rejected with the site's help. You can search for questions with the [rejected] tag:

"The rejected tag is used on patent applications and patents which have been successfully narrowed or rejected by the USPTO after having been the subject of a prior-art-request on Ask Patents."

When we search for questions with this tag, we see text like "This Patent Application received a Final Rejection by the US Patent Office! The rejection was based in part on prior art found by Ask Patents community below!"

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#23

Post by razh »

mbrubeck wrote: post #18
realusername wrote: post #6

I don't want to spoil their great "innovation patent" but Three.js has implemented this years ago ( http://threejs.org/docs/#Reference/Renderers/CanvasRenderer ).

Does that reconstruct quads as the Zynga post described? From the source code, it seems to just draw the triangles individually: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/1769fbfc6c994b51a54c... I also don't see any heuristic processing of shaders as described for ZyGL.

three.js removed support for quads to reduce renderer complexity.

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Face...

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/88092284cbe07723fe2b...

And the relevant issue: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/3663

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#24

Post by _random_ »

mmastrac wrote: post #2

Ugh: 'we developed a patent-pending solution called “ZyGL”.' While there are a bunch of people working to make stuff performant on browsers, Zynga comes in from behind and starts patenting barely-novel stuff on top of it.

Hopefully they will be able to extend and extinguish as well, so that the so called "open web" (that is actually pretty much closed to different languages and technologies, unless you are willing to use crap-trans-pilation crutch like Emscripten) or at least WebGL will die as it should. All the best to Zynga!

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#25

Post by mbrubeck »

razh wrote: post #23
mbrubeck wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that reconstruct quads as the Zynga post described? From the source code, it seems to just draw the triangles individually: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/1769fbfc6c994b51a54c... I also don't see any heuristic processing of shaders as described for ZyGL.

three.js removed support for quads to reduce renderer complexity. https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Face... https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/88092284cbe07723fe2b... And the relevant issue: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/3663

Even before that change, I don't see any code that automatically reconstructs construct quads from pairs of triangles. But maybe I'm missing something?

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#26

Post by nacs »

realusername wrote: post #6

I don't want to spoil their great "innovation patent" but Three.js has implemented this years ago ( http://threejs.org/docs/#Reference/Renderers/CanvasRenderer ).

Pixi.js ( http://www.pixijs.com ) supports WebGL with an automatic canvas fallback as well (and is also used as the renderer by Javascript game frameworks like Phaser.io and Panda.js).

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#27

Post by razh »

mbrubeck wrote: post #25
razh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

three.js removed support for quads to reduce renderer complexity. https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Face... https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/88092284cbe07723fe2b... And the relevant issue: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/3663

Even before that change, I don't see any code that automatically reconstructs construct quads from pairs of triangles. But maybe I'm missing something?

No, you're right, there's no quad reconstruction. I imagine you could have just used quads in both the WebGL and Canvas renderers to achieve a similar effect.

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#28

Post by themartorana »

Alupis wrote: post #11
mmastrac wrote: post #2

Ugh: 'we developed a patent-pending solution called “ZyGL”.' While there are a bunch of people working to make stuff performant on browsers, Zynga comes in from behind and starts patenting barely-novel stuff on top of it.

Not to mention IE10 is already Old. I lost a little more respect for Zynga today.

You had any left?

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#29

Post by robterrell »

realusername wrote: post #6

I don't want to spoil their great "innovation patent" but Three.js has implemented this years ago ( http://threejs.org/docs/#Reference/Renderers/CanvasRenderer ).

I don't know what exactly is being patented. As I read it, the novel part is this:

So, what about that arbitrary shader code? In practice, the shaders used in 2D games tend to be fairly simple. ZyGL applies a series of heuristics to the shader code to try to infer its intent. It then uses these heuristics to map the draw calls through to some approximations of common shader code that we wrote in JavaScript.

I'm not aware of any prior art that is (a) a polyfill for WebGL using canvas that also (b) reconstructs triangle strips into canvas quads and (c) attempts to mimic shader effects by scanning the shader code for common techniques.

Re: Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10

#30

Post by tormeh »

omglol wrote: post #13
Alupis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been said before, but I'll say it again: The USPTO does not and will not look at nor use an end-user forums like "Ask Patents" for the basis of any decision.

Ask Patents has some good information, but also a lot of bad information or just plain wrong claims by rando's on the internet. The USPTO has their own internal databases they look to for research information.

Which works oh so very well.
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