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MayorOfMonkeys

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I'm seeing a dramatic up-tick in companies wanting WebGL content to be built, either in-house or externally. WebVR is only going to accelerate this trend. So, sure, picking up skills around WebGL content creation should be a safe bet but avoid learning WebGL at a low level. Tools like PlayCanvas are there to help you get excellent results in a fraction of the time - you're much better off learning that.

Gravity.js 10 years ago

PlayCanvas is built on WebGL which leverages hardware antialiasing by default.

BMW i8 in WebGL 11 years ago

The engine itself is open source (MIT license): https://github.com/playcanvas/engine If you want a fancy editor to build more quickly, it's free to work in public. And for 'garage-outfits' that want to work in private, it's $15/month. I wouldn't call that serious dough. My gym membership is $70/month!

BMW i8 in WebGL 11 years ago

You can't make this in Unity. Unity doesn't support the mobile browser whereas this runs on an iPhone 4S.

BMW i8 in WebGL 11 years ago

It's because Unity and Epic cross-compile large codebases to many MBs of JavaScript. This simply overwhelms the JavaScript engines on mobile. The PlayCanvas engine on the other hand is hand-written and is 125KB of JavaScript.

BMW i8 in WebGL 11 years ago

I'm not sure what's up with your iPhone 4S (although you do say 'equivalent') but on my 4S, I get around 10FPS. Not fast, but usable.

BMW i8 in WebGL 11 years ago

Have you tried it on your mobile? The fact you can experience this kind of content in the mobile browser and even mobile Facebook and Twitter clients without having to visit an app store is new and IMHO, very exciting.

Interesting. I notice you're using X3DOM. If you're looking for more realistic rendering capabilities, it's definitely worth checking out the open source PlayCanvas engine. Codebase: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine Toolset: https://playcanvas.com/ The engine has physically based rendering integrated into it. Here's an example: http://playcanv.as/p/SA7hVBLt Ping the info 'at' playcanvas 'dot' com address to find out more.

Take this PlayCanvas game for example: http://tanx.playcanvas.com/ It's a mere 1MB. You can play it in the mobile browser, mobile Facebook, Twitter Google+ clients, and mobile messaging apps. UDK and Unity can't hit those platforms. Also, with PlayCanvas, you're making your games online alongside a community that can collaborate with you, comment on your progress, help you fix bugs and so on. So I guess PlayCanvas is GitHub+Google Docs to UDK/Unity's MS Office.

You can still do your own stuff in PlayCanvas (write your own shaders, procedurally create geometry, etc etc). But there's extra stuff you get: physically based renderer, powerful chunk based shader system, point light shadows, entity-component system, and lots more besides. Definitely worth checking out. :) Sounds like you're not interested in higher level tools, but the PlayCanvas Editor is really cool too (that's on https://playcanvas.com - and it's optional). It's essentially Unity in the browser.