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WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

zephyrosanemos.com

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Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#81

Post by SammoJ »

Tloewald wrote: post #72
nestoras wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha thanks :) I've done these things in the past many times, only on different platforms. The real kudos go to the browser guys (especially at Mozilla and Google) for all the superb work they've done on WebGL and JavaScript in general. Learning JavaScript and some of the intricacies of developing for the web has never been more fun! :)

Not discussion that I can see of your rendering techniques. Are your shadows baked?

If you grab the resources you can see the lightmaps.

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#82

Post by uptown »

bjourne wrote: post #6

Looks nice but runs at awfully slow 4-5 fps on my Ubuntu 64bit system. Is Radeon HD 4200 to weak for WebGL or is there something you need to configure?

60FPS with info windows turned off on a maxed out late 2012 iMac.

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#84

Post by rorrr »

networked wrote: post #28

Cool demo. What caught my attention was this line in the description: >The terrain is procedural, generated offline by a Delphi program (Delphi is a modern version of Pascal). Nowadays I very rarely see new projects use Object Pascal or Delphi. This is somewhat disappointing since I think it really is a fine language that could be a viable alternative to C++ and Java due to its combination of high performance and cle…

I used to write Pascal a decade ago. Does it still have endless begin-end statements?

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#85

Post by jevinskie »

networked wrote: post #28

Cool demo. What caught my attention was this line in the description: >The terrain is procedural, generated offline by a Delphi program (Delphi is a modern version of Pascal). Nowadays I very rarely see new projects use Object Pascal or Delphi. This is somewhat disappointing since I think it really is a fine language that could be a viable alternative to C++ and Java due to its combination of high performance and cle…

I was very impressed when I found out that Pascal supports subrange types (that is types with custom, user-defined ranges). I had only seen it in VHDL / Ada before, where I found it to be very useful.

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#86

Post by mcmire »

That looks really nice. A lot of WebGL demos these days don't really show the full extend of what WebGL can do, so to my eyes it's basically equivalent to something like VRML (anyone remember that?). Of course WebGL/OpenGL and VRML are totally different but you get the idea. Yeah I know there's stuff like Quake in WebGL but it's not really the same thing, because Quake was designed for lesser powered machines.

I'm still waiting for someone to make a fully fledged game in WebGL because I can totally see it happening.

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#87

Post by jbarham »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #79
aubergene wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found some pleasant similarities between Pascal and Go (Golang)

What are they, aside from just := and the lack of brackets?

Go's declaration syntax (http://golang.org/doc/articles/gos_declaration_syntax.html) and package system are inspired by the Pascal family, according to the FAQ (http://golang.org/doc/faq#ancestors).

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#88

Post by satori99 »

Impressive!

Is there a reason you decided to implement a WebGL UI, instead of using HTML for the user interface elements?

Is native browser compositing too slow with multiple HTML elements on top of the WebGL canvas?

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#89

Post by sehugg »

networked wrote: post #28

Cool demo. What caught my attention was this line in the description: >The terrain is procedural, generated offline by a Delphi program (Delphi is a modern version of Pascal). Nowadays I very rarely see new projects use Object Pascal or Delphi. This is somewhat disappointing since I think it really is a fine language that could be a viable alternative to C++ and Java due to its combination of high performance and cle…

I used Delphi for a 16-bit Windows game ages ago. However I skipped all of the UI builder stuff (which is the primary reason you'd want to use it in the first place) and coded directly against the Windows API, with the help of some inline asm.

So why not just use C? There were good reasons. In 1992 C/C++ compilers on the PC were slow -- pre-compiled headers were still mysterious -- and Delphi's handwritten compiler and integrated linker made the edit/compile/run cycle very very fast. It made small, fast, completely stand-alone (no MSVCRT.DLL or anything) binaries -- a feature which still supposedly makes it popular with malware authors.

The UI builder was excellent and perfect for knocking off one-off tools like the terrain generator described above. As long as you stuck to Windows, of course.

I don't know if I would necessarily go back though. While I sometimes miss some of Pascal's features like ranged types and sets (and bounds checking on arrays) the performance advantages of the specific Borland implementation have become less important, and there are other contenders that cover a bigger problem space than the delta between Pascal and C.

BTW, here's where Google Trends says Delphi is popular nowadays: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=delphi&cmpt=q

Re: WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

#90

Post by e12e »

networked wrote: post #28

Cool demo. What caught my attention was this line in the description: >The terrain is procedural, generated offline by a Delphi program (Delphi is a modern version of Pascal). Nowadays I very rarely see new projects use Object Pascal or Delphi. This is somewhat disappointing since I think it really is a fine language that could be a viable alternative to C++ and Java due to its combination of high performance and cle…

I did a course on object pascal in 2002 (just before that college, like many others, switched to java). A few months ago, I had a look at Ada, and found it pleasantly similar to object pascal. If you've played with pascal, but not with Ada, I recommend having a look :-) Eg:

http://blogs.fsfe.org/thomaslocke/2013/02/10/using-the-ada-w...

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