Sunday 6 October 2013

WebGL is good for your health

Here's a totally random link I've happened to find on the internet: https://3d.casinofloor.com/.
What is this you might say?! Am I trying to lure you to some online casino and get incredibly wealthy? Well, that, and take a closer look at the link - it says "3d"! Now click on the link, wait 2 seconds for it to load and feast your eyes on one of the biggest tech-demos showing off WebGL - it's a 300 meter long cathedral-like casino containing a ton of slot machines, animated characters, particles, reflective water, gazillions of bottles and glasses, spooky statues and a never-ending sunset.

As far as I'm aware there are only 2 other neat demos out there showing off huge environments in WebGL. The first is the Epic Citadel demo by the makes of the Unreal engine and the second is Bananabread. These 2 are initially coded in C++ and then transpiled in asm.js flavoured JavaScript. Wait, why are people in this age coding in C++ and then spitting out javascript-machine-code-wannabe apps on the web? Plain JavaScript is fast and mature enough to develop in and drive huge applications as well - as proof,  the Casinofloor demo uses the Goo Engine which is written from scratch in JavaScript.

tl;dr? Short version: goo.js rules and check out the little snippet below: