scrottie

Using OpenGL as a browser plugin can't help but remind me of the long and awkward reigns of Java and Flash as browser plugins. Bizarrely, three.js (and maybe something lower down on the stack) did GL rendering to HTML Canvas elements without host graphics card GL support (probably using the popular free Mesa library that implements GL on top of the host CPU). That that seems to have gone away seems a vote of confidence as GL as a plugin but also its past existence is a fall-back if that ever goes away. When Flash finally went away, it leave a bit of a void that emulation only partially filled. So far, it's reign has been longer than Silverlight's. Adobe trying to do both Flash and Shockwave we won't talk about. That JavaScript is the most portable, accessible GL out there is still bizarre. Who decided this should be in the browser? When? What happened in that meeting?

Anyway http://slowass.net/~scott/tmp/opengl.html (mouse works)

I did manage to start a discussion on making the example work and one other student weighed in with a function re-write before I did but I was pleased to figure out how to fix the thing up and another student asking questions. For me and my slightly older browser version (it's crazy that you have to have up to the minute versions of things now), I had to download an older version of the three.js library to get it to go. If you don't start the discussion, people get left behind. This is far in the JavaScript weeds at this point.

I still swear that this was easier in version 1.1 on a real SGI, and one of these texts confirms that later versions of GL are faster and more powerful but earlier versions were easier.