stupid question to webgl experts here?
- can you build an entire fps shooter game using web gl? how is physics handled? how is collision detection, enemy AI handled? what kind of frame rate can you expect from a counter strike game made in web gl?
- what is the difference between webgl and threejs and babylonjs?
- what is the man hour effort involved for doing something like this assuming you know html, css and js pretty well but not familiar with gamedev
- is open gl the non web version of web gl? or are they completely different?
Very few questions are stupid, these are not.
Yes, you can definitely build an entire fps game using WebGL for rendering. Typically using JavaScript to handle physics, collision, gameplay, etc.
My current WebGL project is rendering high definition terrain, high-poly animated models, thousands of particles, shaders, sound and more over 150 frames-per-second on a 10 year old PC with a RTX 3060. I have found hardware acceleration is often not enabled in the browser, or Windows will default to using the integrated-graphics card when running the browser and that must be changed in the Windows Graphics Settings.
WebGL is a graphics API for talking right to the graphics card, supported by The Browser. ThreeJS and BabylonJS are libraries that make it easier to render 2D and 3D graphics, both use WebGL and/or WebGPU behind the scenes for rendering.
Development with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and WebGL is my favorite stack to work with. Development is fast, re-loading is quick, errors and debugging is handled directly in the browsers which have great debug information and performance tracking. No compile time and support on lots of devices.
Yes, OpenGL came first. WebGL is a JavaScript binding of a subset of OpenGL functionalities.
- first of all thank you very much for the detailed insight
- as a guy who is very much new to gamedev, threejs etc but not to programming (have a decade of programming experience on backends, android apps etc) i am running into lots of questions as i try to build a mental model of what game dev process looks like
- let us say i wanted to add a player 3d model into this setup, the player can walk, run, crouch, shoot, throw a grenade, go prone, take cover to the wall etc. how do these animations get implemented? what kind of tools are needed for making these animations
- i read that the technique used is called skeletal animation. how are you supposed to think about this? you press w, the character moves forward. in terms of animation that means your character needs to play the standing at one place animation initially and transition to the walking animation as long as the w button is pressed. now you press shift and this walking animation needs to transition to running animation as long as shift is pressed. is this the right way to think about this?
- do we need intermediate animations like "transition from walk to run", "transition from run to walk", "transition from walk to crouch" etc? that would add a lot of states would it not?
- are there LLM tools that you are aware of that are capable of generating these animations?
- i also read there are different file formats like obj, fbx, m3d, glb etc. is the same data stored in these files in a slightly different way like csv vs json or are they completely different?
But much more likely is you won't be making animations, you'll be buying them (or getting them for free). There are many places you can buy these animations already, already rigged to a skeleton.
Some examples (I don't endorse them specifically):
https://characters3d.com/
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/game-animation-sampl...
Think about giving direction to an actor. You give high-level instructions to the animation system, and it picks the animation based on rules about what animation to use in what situation, that you already set up. It manages the transition to the next animation, all of which are animations of the skeleton, that the character model adapts to (including physics-based parts of the character like hair and cloth)Generally speaking, you define animation cycles (e.g. walk cycle, run cycle), and then transition between two different animations that are in phase with each other, but it can be a lot more complicated in order to look more natural.
Unity has the Animation Controller. Unreal has "Motion Matching". Godot has Animation Trees.
If you want to, yes, but also you can have the game engine interpolateYou haven't even mentioned things like having the character's feet stand realisticly on non-level ground. For that you would use inverse kinematics, but not too much of it because it has a tendancy to go wonky
Yes but you'd be better off with animations someone has already created, they tend to look better. Many companies now offering AI-based 3D character generators too. They all have different purposes. You want glTF/glB (same format but in text vs binary) for most purposesTry out this FPS game project for the Godot Engine: https://github.com/godotengine/tps-demo
> Development with HTML/CSS/JavaScript and WebGL is my favorite stack to work with.
I love this myself, but..
> have great debug information
How do you debug WebGL stuff? I find that to be one of the least debuggable things I've ever done with computers. If there's multiple shaders feeding into one another, the best I can usually come up with is drawing the intermediate results to screen and debugging visually. Haven't been paying too much attention to the space the past 2-3 years though, so I'm wondering if some new tools emerged that make this easier.
The JavaScript debugging is great right out of The Browser these days.
WebGL debugging... it's a combination of how you're doing it, visually, especially for shader-related issues. For API calls, logging gets most things figured out, there is also this: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGLDeveloperTools
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You can implement the graphics part of it using WebGL. It's strictly a graphics API for drawing to the screen. But there are specific libraries for eg physics that you can use in your WebGL 2 app, or entire 3D engines (like those you mentioned) targeting WebGL around. Or you can DIY.
> is open gl the non web version of web gl? or are they completely different?
The current version of WebGL, WebGL 2, is like OpenGL ES 3.0.
> what is the man hour effort involved for doing something like this assuming you know html, css and js pretty well but not familiar with gamedev
Almost trivial with Ai. I just started making games with threejs. threejs is pretty much the abstractions you'd end up writing your self if you wanted to use webgl.
The hard part is refining, polish, creating fun mechanics, and creating assets.
> Almost trivial with Ai.
Not true in the slightest.
> The hard part is refining, polish, creating fun mechanics, and creating assets.
All things that AI cannot, by definition, do. So, not trivial at all with AI.
Fuck AI, man.