Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

olePigeon · Nov 27, 2005, 02:31 PM

http://www.abrahamjoffe.com.au/ben/canvascape/

Now THAT'S cool. I've been waiting to say this: Requires FireFox, Safari, or Opera; does not work with Internet Explorer.

Dark Helmet · Nov 27, 2005, 02:51 PM

What's the big deal? I don't get it.

brapper · Nov 27, 2005, 03:02 PM

and how do I shoot my name into the wall?
(I like where this project is going tho.)

loki74 · Nov 27, 2005, 03:33 PM

Well I'm with Dark Helmet on this one... its not a huge deal.

Haven't we been able to do 3D within browsers for a while now?

At any rate, the incompatability with IE kicks ass! They should get one of those "TOO COOL for IE" badges!

- - e r i k - - · Nov 27, 2005, 06:57 PM

Yes we have. I played 3D racing games in the browser in 2000.

tooki · Nov 27, 2005, 08:11 PM

As far as I can tell, it's pure JavaScript, and THAT is cool! Years ago, browsers wouldn't have been running on computers with enough CPU performance to do that in JS.

It would also explain the incompatibility, since IE doesn't actually support JavaScript (it supports only an MS bastardization of JavaScript called JScript).

tooki

Dark Helmet · Nov 27, 2005, 08:20 PM

Remember Quickdraw 3d? That was impressive on 75MHz. Not this.

tooki · Nov 27, 2005, 10:07 PM

Yep, but it was written as a 3D API. JavaScript is a slow interpreted general purpose scripting language. Performance will be vastly lower on a given piece of hardware than a purpose-specific API.

tooki

Eug Wanker · Nov 27, 2005, 10:24 PM

OMG it makes me want to rip my hair out it's so slow... at least on my iBook 1.33.

brapper · Nov 28, 2005, 12:43 AM

uh...it's pretty qick on my PB 1ghz

Dark Helmet · Nov 28, 2005, 12:46 AM

Originally Posted by brapper

uh...it's pretty qick on my PB 1ghz

Pretty damn slow on my Dual G5.

MaxPower2k3 · Nov 28, 2005, 01:36 AM

Safari runs it horribly slow, but it runs quite nicely in Firefox on my iMac G5 2.0. an impressive use of javascript, certainly, but i don't know how practical it is

Cubeoid · Nov 28, 2005, 02:27 AM

why a gun? why not a fork? :/

olePigeon · Nov 28, 2005, 10:48 AM

Here's Quake 2 written in Java:

http://www.bytonic.de/html/jake2.html

You could embed the applet in a webpage and play it there. It even supports multiplayer and everything.

tavilach · Nov 28, 2005, 12:50 PM

So, a replacement PowerBook that I got a few months ago has felt very slow the entire time I've had it, considering that it is 1.67GHz/512MB. With essentially nothing else open, I get 1fps on this game in Safari. Does that confirm the speed issue?

Edit: Nevermind. Looks like it's only fast on Firefox according to the above posts.

MaxPower · Nov 28, 2005, 01:48 PM

It isnt supposed to compete with the likes of the Java Quake or other games. Rather, it is an example of some of the cool vector stuff you can do with the <canvas> tag.

Chuckit · Nov 28, 2005, 01:53 PM

Yeah, the point is that this is not developed as a full-fledged program, it doesn't require any plugins — it's a Web page that you can play.

olePigeon · Nov 28, 2005, 02:59 PM

I have no problems running that webpage just like a normal game on my 1.67GHz PowerBook with Safari. Is yer OS X fully updated?

Chuckit · Nov 28, 2005, 03:04 PM

Originally Posted by tavilach

So, a replacement PowerBook that I got a few months ago has felt very slow the entire time I've had it, considering that it is 1.67GHz/512MB. With essentially nothing else open, I get 1fps on this game in Safari. Does that confirm the speed issue?

Edit: Nevermind. Looks like it's only fast on Firefox according to the above posts.

It's slow on my last-gen 1.5 GHz PowerBook, but not 1 fps slow. It's more like 5 fps.

tooki · Nov 28, 2005, 03:18 PM

Originally Posted by olePigeon

Here's Quake 2 written in Java:

http://www.bytonic.de/html/jake2.html

You could embed the applet in a webpage and play it there. It even supports multiplayer and everything.

Java ≠ JavaScript. (The only thing they share is the name, and even that is wrong: JavaScript's real name is ECMAscript.)

The point, as MaxPower said, is that this is done purely in the browser, with no plugins needed.

tooki

ghporter · Nov 28, 2005, 03:32 PM

It doesn't work on Firefox for Windows...and that's all I have where I am right now.

tooki · Nov 28, 2005, 03:42 PM

It should work fine on version 1.5. You are probably running some variant of 1.0.

tooki

Chuckit · Nov 28, 2005, 03:42 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

It doesn't work on Firefox for Windows...and that's all I have where I am right now.

Are you using the 1.5 Release Candidate? It doesn't work on 1.0.

ghporter · Nov 28, 2005, 04:03 PM

I'm using version 1.0.7. I wasn't aware that there was a new release candidate, let alone one in the 1.5 range. If 1.5RC3 is running well, I may have to give it a try.

itistoday · Nov 28, 2005, 04:51 PM

That's pretty ****ing amazing... I didn't know javascript could do that. Why is it that all this **** with javascript is only happening now??? It's been around for years (including AJAX).

Chuckit · Nov 28, 2005, 04:57 PM

Originally Posted by itistoday

That's pretty ****ing amazing... I didn't know javascript could do that. Why is it that all this **** with javascript is only happening now??? It's been around for years (including AJAX).

Browsers are just now starting to become sufficiently compatible that people actually feel it worthwhile to experiment with JavaScript. Until recently, it had been considered kind of an unreliable toy.

OwlBoy · Nov 28, 2005, 09:45 PM

This is cool because it is not Java/Flash.

The math involved must be crazy

JoshuaZ · Nov 29, 2005, 03:26 AM

Hey cool. Did you guys know you could like view videos in webpages! Holy wow! Next thing you know you'll be able to listen to music over the web. How crazy.

Chuckit · Nov 29, 2005, 12:22 PM

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

Hey cool. Did you guys know you could like view videos in webpages! Holy wow! Next thing you know you'll be able to listen to music over the web. How crazy.

Did you know that writing a little bit of code that passes a movie URL to a QuickTime plugin is way less impressive than this? Now, if somebody actually wrote a movie player in HTML + JavaScript, then you would be onto something cool.

tooki · Nov 29, 2005, 12:29 PM

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

Hey cool. Did you guys know you could like view videos in webpages! Holy wow! Next thing you know you'll be able to listen to music over the web. How crazy.

You don't get it. This is the browser running the game 100%. It's not the browser calling another program (like Java, Flash, etc) and passing the game off to it.

tooki