The demos are really mind-blowing. Stuff that I never expected to come so fast to the browser are becoming a reality. This is really exciting stuff for me. I will definitely use some of these libraries (linked to from the page) in a few upcoming canvas based projects.
Well, the docs are a little out of date but most of it works as it did before. I had about 3 lines to change when I started using the webgl version. (details of what needs change is available here: http://code.google.com/p/o3d/wiki/GettingStarted)
Some parts are not yet implemented but I've managed to get work done without using any of them. The core devs are often on the mailinglist: http://groups.google.com/group/o3d-discuss
The repos are active, last update was last week. I just use whatever they have in SVN right now, the packages on their webstite is very outdated.
I'm getting 60 fps approximately for the spinning cube with chrome 6 on Ubuntu Lucid and my laptop has a core i3 with built in arrandale based GPU, not an nvidia or ati one.
Not long ago, on an older laptop, I was getting the same fps for native Linux apps. Seems browsers are acquiring native capabilities, but at a faster rate :)
For some reason I'm getting horrible crashes on my app (has worked great for months. Still works great on Linux and Windows) since chrome switched to gpu rendering for everything. I haven't found the issue yet but it's really odd.
I had really bad crashes (high pitch noise, bright white flash, driver killed) on Firefox 4 and Chrome 7 when they started to use HW acceleration and problems went away after the update.
No luck on that, I checked and there was in fact a graphics update but that didn't affect the behavior. My next step is to try to figure out what is causing it to make a bug report.
Oh, most of them are, but the ones with textures seem to be awfully slow (the earth one for instance). Works nice in chromium though.
I guess that has to do with hardware acceleration. FF3.x does not have that yet, so it's falling back to software rendering SVG's, and software rendering is.. you know, awfully slow.
Try the FF4 beta if you want to see how things shape up, I think that has HW acceleration built in, though I'm not sure how far they are with WebGL.
I really only glanced at the code so I could be wrong here. But it appeared to me as though the main loop was written with something like, 1000 / 60, which was probably intended to cap at 60fps.
If you took that code and modified the loop to run more frequently, do you get even better performance?
Yea - there's a great project using this for parametric 3D design in the browser: http://CloudScad.com. Has the ability to produce 3D printable files too.
