The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in the post is really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive. Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+):
Is it? I mean, it's nice that it can be played "in the browser" but from a graphics fidelity perspective (and artistic direction, but that's beside the point) it's not impressive. It looks like 6-7 year old game graphics, without the interactivity and complexity.
Well, i think the clouds are procedural and you get soft edges in the water. But yeah, i like the scene but the performance is abysmal (45 FPS on "Ultra" on my GTX980 for a scene that generally looks emptier and more repeat-y than what you see when you exit Half-Life 2's metro station).
I'm not sure if it is because of WebGL 2, Firefox, the PlayCanvas engine or just this demo though. But unless WebGL 2 imposes big performance penalties, i doubt this is representative of what could be done.
I don't know why you were downvoted. This demo doesn't feel more impressive than the 13 year old Half Life 2, let alone the 10 year old Crysis. Both interactive games rather than a tech demo.
It's a combination of problems but IMHO mostly due to things like: lack of tooling, immaturity of graphics libraries and especially immaturity of WebGL2 in those libraries, and modelling/art direction.
The technology is pretty capable but the ecosystem around it pales in comparison to the platforms driving many of today's AAA and indie games.
And what's even worse, so many drivers have issues when compiling shaders that were writen maliciously (or even regular ones), that I'd say we'll see security problems with this really soon, the same we saw them when web fonts started to pop in and code that dealt with fonts simply wasn't written with security in mind
I just upgraded to FF 51 on debian from mozilla.debian.org and when I click your link I get this message:
"This demo requires WebGL 2.0 support. Please update to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox."
I'm asking around to see what might be going on, but it's more likely to have to do with the specific graphics card and drivers you have than with 32-bit vs 64-bit.
Does about:support say anything interesting in the "graphics" section?
"I don't play games" is such a weird comment to me, just like "I don't read books" or "I don't watch TV" - writing off an entire medium seems rash. (Even if you are just stating you don't, rather than you wouldn't - the fact you identify yourself as not doing so presumably means you are not going to try some of the great works out there).
Although, to be fair, I guess "I don't read poetry".
You can load any game written in BYOND in FireFox and have the performance issues show almost immediately.
But it's especially egregious in mine and I don't know why, as I've done almost nothing besides add a few basic extensions to the base engine to create a somewhat-usable 2D Second Life-esque platform (with far more expansion capability) and FF just dogs on it. Space Station 13 REALLY makes the problems stand out.
A URL to something that shows the problem really would be useful here. I can profile and all that, but it would be good to be profiling something that actually shows the problem.
Tell ya what, give me a few hours to unwind from my gig this morning and I'll see if I can't get my old server actually up and online and port-forwarded. If I can (this assumes I actually have spare ports on the router) I'll send you the link, as I see that No-IP just sent me a renewal notice for the game's domain name anyways.
Only wish invert y-axis was in settings... I may be old school but can't do first person views when moving up makes you look up. Gotta invert the axis for me to be able to play around without messing me up.
I tried opening the link "if you have 51 installed link" on my Samsung C13 chrome book and it crashed it in a strange way. Yes I am aware it's running chrome, but was curious what would happen.
I have it running in developer mode in the beta channel. I'm going to try it again to see if it crashes it again.
Dear God, please kill me now; I can't take any more of this bullshit. How about actually improving the software instead of piling more marketing bling on top?
Hum, you could argue that what they actually need is a sane road map for the project that allocates the devs they have in what the Firefox browser is actually lacking: better performance, memory management and bug fixing.
https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/