This was submitted via the source I got it from (Mozilla Future Releases blog), and directly to the demo page, a couple of days ago by AndrewDucker, but unfortunately got little attention

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5251980

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252075

The problem, it seems, is that the titles were a little Editorialized. Which can get it flagged, as doing this is against the HN guidelines.

But, from my experience[1], WebGL topics have a hard time getting tracktion on Hacker News.

I'm glad this got traction this time. It really is an impressive demo.

[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=web...

Since I was having trouble understanding what the impressive part is here (low polys, (apparently) static lighting, and bump mapping at smooth frame rates have been WebGL tech demos for a while), so I found some more context:

Uningine's news entry: http://unigine.com/news/2013/02/20/crypt-in-browser

A video of the demo they're running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azKNaRD221M

Obviously they haven't implemented / turned off the bells and whistles. Which conflicts a bit with the news entry, which says "with all visual effects". Does anyone know how much they have implemented? I'm interested, but more information seems hard to find.

This WebGL demo is apparently a port of Unigine Crypt which is a mobile version of Unigine Sanctuary (running on Tegra 2):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX25STzOdtM

I'm afraid it's glitchy, and there's something horrible happening on the square panel above the door - looks like two flats superimposed, or transparency moire, or some such.

Sorry, but I'm not especially impressed - this is on a high end desktop machine custom built for gaming at 1920 x 1200(core i7, 12GB RAM, GTX670s etc.) - there's no hardware reason for it not to be perfect. Running Chrome 24.0.1312.57 on Windows 7 64 bit.

It didn't run on my Nexus 7 (no WebGL found) but then I'm not running a beta version of Chrome. Perhaps that would be the impressive bit.

EDIT: updated Chrome to 25.0.1364.97 m (the latest) and got the "Aw, Snap!" dead tab on reloading. State of web development as expected. Perhaps THAT'S why there aren't any AAA titles on WebGL...

In Chrome, all I see is lighting effects occluded by solid black (unshaded) shapes. This is similar to what I see in the BananaBread demo in Chrome.

Works fine in Firefox, but as is typical for WebGL demos in Firefox on my machine, looks like about 10 fps.

I'm on a dual GPU system running Linux + bumblebee. When using the Sandy Bridge GPU, I also see all black with only the lighting highlights visible. Just tried again with the nVidia GPU and it worked fine.

I really like WebGL, and I want it to succeed, but for this to happen developers are going to have to make sure that their code works on reasonably low end hardware (i.e. integrated graphics). This sort of GPU inconsistency is so common with WebGL right now that it reminds me of trying to browse the web on Linux circa 2000.

Not a pleasant experience.

I got a lot of these errors on the console for Chrome: .WebGLRenderingContext: GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_ENUM : glCompressedTexImage2D: internal_format was GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT

Turns out it requires S3TC compression which is not supported in Mesa drivers by default (only decompression is). After installing libtxc_dxtn.so it worked just fine in Chrome.

Also it doesn't work with Firefox 10.0.12, even if I enable WebGL. It does work with latest nightly (Firefox 22.0a1) though.

Aha! Installing the libtxc_dxtn_s2tc0 package fixed it, and it ran smoothly (with a small periodic stutter). That fixed BananaBread too (well, it's still buggy, but sometimes it works correctly). That package seriously needs to be a default for Ubuntu, given how many WebGL pages I've seen it break.

Another solution is to: "export force_s3tc_enable=true" (or equivalent setting in ~/.drirc) since only decompression is needed.

works fine in chrome for me

Bravo! Very nice smoothing on the angel statue closeup.

Framerate was a bit low but maybe that's just me (Mid 2010 MBP 15").

Keep at it!

That is cool. and it works well. Even on my linux laptop. Also on Firefox. In fact, it seems faster in Firefox than Chrome. Maybe because its been dev with Firefox as test platform or something.. I wonder.

Wow. Amazing demo, can't wait for WebGL animated movies that look this good!

This has quite a way to go. I'm running Firefox 18 on my Radeon HD 6970 card (high end gaming grade) and there's quite a bit of stuttering every few seconds.

Maybe the javascript garbage collection?

Whenever I see demos like this, I wonder why we don't have full-blown WebGL games out there? What are the limiting factors? Can somebody explain the issues?

So when is Unigine going to launch a cross-platform OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 benchmark for Android and iOS? They seem to have it for everything else except mobile.

Stuck at Loading... after successfully loading several Loading... screens.

Gotta say I've never been so impressed with the loading capabilities of a game engine before.

FF 19.0 OS 10.8.2.

They blatantly copied, ripped-off even, the Mozilla BananaBread loading page, even copying the Mozilla bar.

Why?

I'm only speculating, but perhaps they literally copied it - BananaBread is under the BSD license.

Is the mozilla bar thing, though?

Oh, I see what you mean now. Yeah, that seems odd.

Ah, it's under the MPL, they're allowed to copy it:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/tabzilla/tabzilla.js

http://crypt-webgl.unigine.com/js/tabzilla.js

All that stuff is open source, so nothing wrong here.

(I'm one of the people that works on BananaBread.)

All I see is a slideshow of nicely rendered images. Yes, my browser is capable of WebGL.

..did you run the demo? It actually generates those in WebGL not as still frames but as real, dynamic scenes which are panned through.

In fact, I was utterly blown away by how smooth (absolutely lag free and very fluid) yet detailed this demo was. Very impressive.

I'm suspect about how there are no movement controls. It's all prescripted. There aren't any physics either. Not impressive.

I think this is quite impressive. As for the movement controls and physics, both introduce complexity completely unnecessary for a tech demo.

...you do realize this isn't a game, right?

Nonsense.

There is nothing compelling about WebGL except that it is interactive.

If I wanted a non-interactive scene that repeats, I could do it in anything and upload it as a video on youtube.

Dynamic interactive 3d is the exciting thing about webGL and it is the the thing missing from this demo, so I too, am disappoint.

Since you're so unimpressed. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread

Maybe click the big LAUNCH DEMO button?

Just pointing out on an Air, the 'Launch Demo' is completely below the fold and you don't even realize there is more to the page. Yay for UX :)

I don't get it. How have 90% of start up websites not conditioned you to scroll below the fold? Scrolling is more pervasive today in UX than it was 10 years ago. (See: Bootstrap)

Did you try it in Firefox? For me it gets stuck on "Loading..." in Chrome (Windows 7, Nvidia) but it runs fine in Firefox.

Edit: here are error messages from console:

  [STDOUT] Could not create canvas - TypeError: Cannot read property 'inspectContext' of undefined game-setup.js:11
  Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'viewport' of undefined allengine_no_native.js:89

Edit2: Mystery solved, apparently problems are caused by some clashes with WebGL Inspector Chrome extension. Demo works after disabling it.

No problem here with Chrome (Windows 8, Nvidia).

Press "Launch Demo".

This works really well in the Chrome beta browser on my nexus 7