I'm super frustrated by the state of 3D on web right now as an app developer. I wish we just had Vulkan on the web ...
Right now your options are basically having a GLES renderer that you can restrict to WebGL2 (so no compute shaders, etc. and other things that make desktop OpenGL acceptable for writing a modern renderer) or having to abstract over Vulkan/WebGPU yourself, which are similar but different enough to increase your code complexity considerably.
There's abstractions like wgpu and bgfx you can commit to, and of course you can just use game engine middleware and have it all done for you, but overall things fall short of just being able to "write once, run anywhere" a renderer, sadly.
modeless 18 minutes ago [-]
> your options are basically having a GLES renderer that you can restrict to WebGL2 (so no compute shaders, etc. and other things that make desktop OpenGL acceptable for writing a modern renderer) or having to abstract over Vulkan/WebGPU yourself
I don't understand this complaint. What's worse about using WebGPU over using GLES? Seems like a strict improvement. You can use WebGPU anywhere, you're not required to "abstract" over Vulkan. If you're talking about using it outside of the web, you just choose wgpu or Dawn as your implementation, it's the same API and even the same implementation as you'd get in a browser.
adfm 17 minutes ago [-]
What's holding it back? Is there something to be done to make it less frustrating? What would make "The Hardware-Accelerated Web" a breeze to use for developers?
I actually have an implementation of that too, since I was fascinated by the twisting cloth example, but need to figure out how best to incorporate it, or if it’s better in a standalone experiment.
mjmdavis 3 hours ago [-]
This is really awesome. Great work.
I aspire to build cool stuff like this in WebGPU.
Very excited for the future of the web.
juretriglav 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks! Never been easier to start than right now. This physics engine is a bit opaque in terms of how it works, but I recently wrote about a global illumination approach that uses surfels - I break it down into small manageable pieces, with plenty of interactive visualizations, and it's also in WebGPU! If you have some time, maybe take a look at that and start taking it apart: https://juretriglav.si/surfel-based-global-illumination-on-t...
Stevvo 2 hours ago [-]
It can definitely be achieved with Claude. Even with no experience in graphics progammming, I've been able to replicate results of several papers in related to fluid simulation.
Right now your options are basically having a GLES renderer that you can restrict to WebGL2 (so no compute shaders, etc. and other things that make desktop OpenGL acceptable for writing a modern renderer) or having to abstract over Vulkan/WebGPU yourself, which are similar but different enough to increase your code complexity considerably.
There's abstractions like wgpu and bgfx you can commit to, and of course you can just use game engine middleware and have it all done for you, but overall things fall short of just being able to "write once, run anywhere" a renderer, sadly.
I don't understand this complaint. What's worse about using WebGPU over using GLES? Seems like a strict improvement. You can use WebGPU anywhere, you're not required to "abstract" over Vulkan. If you're talking about using it outside of the web, you just choose wgpu or Dawn as your implementation, it's the same API and even the same implementation as you'd get in a browser.
I aspire to build cool stuff like this in WebGPU.
Very excited for the future of the web.