Re:Raycaster in HTML5 / JavaScript
by zokier on Tuesday October 04, 2011 @01:49PM
(#3071997)
I'd blame the implementation, not the platform in this case though, seeing how others have linked much faster JS raycasters.
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I have to agree. But I still think it's weird that we're giving up Flash, with the argument basically that 3D games aren't necessary in the browser, and then going back to the stone age to reproduce basic 1993-era functionality in Javascript of all things.
I think the general attitude is quite opposite. We're giving up Flash because browser-based gaming actually seems a viable thing. And therefore community feels the need to take control of the platform away from singular corporation (Adobe) to somewhat neutral committee (WHATWG).
This doesn't really answer the question. In what way is it viable if it's currently a tiny fraction of the speed of what's easily attainable with a plugin, and shows little chance of improvement over the next five years?
Could you point some benchmark actually showing canvas performing at tiny fraction of Flash's speed? Considering that they both are ECMAScript-based and Firefox got even some code from Adobe for their JS engine, I'd imagine that the performance difference wouldn't be that great.
I found one (micro)benchmark[1], and in my quick unscientific tests, canvas-version performed quite well compared to Flash (70 FPS for canvas, and 40 FPS for Flash, Firefox 7 on Windows 7).
And I certainly believe that there is great chance of improvement, as the APIs an techniques are quite young yet. See Mozillas Azure project as an example: http://blog.mozilla.com/joe/2011/04/26/introducing-the-azure...