3D engines written for the HTML <canva> element

[Farid]

Canva is a new HTML element that can be used to generate graphics. It should be part of HTML 5, unless something changes at the last minute.

You can read more about it here:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#canvas (HTML 5 draft, so it's a huge file)
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Canvas_tutorial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element)

Anyway, I just stumbled upon some cool 3D engines that use the canva element and thought that it wouldn't bad a idea to start a thread about it. Not taht i expect a lot of interest from the average B3D reader, but I like to index all the cool 3D related knowledge and techniques I read about. And I'm sure this might interest a few folks around here, if only for curiosity's sake.

Canvascape:



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

Canvascape with textures:

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

A raycaster:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/A_Basic_RayCaster

To test the demos, you might have to use Firefox, Opera or Safari. Canvascape uses Google's IE Canva script, os it should work with IE (I didn't try, though).

 

[Spy Hunter]

This is cool stuff. I have seen a better FPS demo that was faster and supported more features, like animated sprites for objects and characters, and it had part of a DOOM level loaded in I think. I can't seem to find it now.

But anyway, Beyond3D readers might find it more interesting that there are plans to get *real* 3D acceleration support into the Canvas tag by exposing OpenGL to Javascript! You can even download a prototype for Firefox. Javascript is still probably too slow for real games right now, but tentative plans for Firefox 4 (or maybe 5) include a JIT compiler for Javascript, so the future looks bright. Also, if shaders are exposed to Javascript, you could imagine doing GPGPU in a web page.

 

[Nick]

Seems too slow for 3D interactive games. Why not just use Shockwave3D?

 

[[maven]]

Seems too slow for 3D interactive games. Why not just use Shockwave3D?

It works just fine (~30 fps or so) in Safari on Mac OS 10.5.2 FWIW. Certainly faster than Wolfenstein 3D was back on my PC in the day...

 

[Ilfirin]

In a related note, has anyone had a chance to play around with .NET 3.5's WPF 3D controls to see if some simple 3D games could be made with it? All the demos I ran on it had unbelievably simple objects running at unbelievably slow rates but I don't know if that was an innate deficiency of the platform or just the way those demos were written.

The documentation states that it's not intended for full-blown 3D games but surely it can handle something like Wolf3D.