WebGL on Old Hardware with MESA

 

WebGL now seems to be  mature enough to add support in jsc.   This would mean you could develop your WebGL applications in C#, Visual Basic or F#. The trick is to get it working on my machine. It seems my graphics card does not support OpenGL ES 2.

TypeError: Object #<a WebGLRenderingContext> has no method 'getShaderi'

Running dxdiag tells me that my Video card Chip Type is ATI Radeon Xpress 1200 Series.

The last time I updated Video card drivers on my machine there were some serious issues due to the fact the application had some issues with the .net framework. As a developer I have all versions of it and it caused problems.

While searching around I found GPU Caps Viewer.

As I can see I have GLSL Version 1.2 – not good.

[...] many common Intel graphics cards doesn’t have OpenGL drivers

[khronos] I’ve found that Firefox needs at least OpenGL 2.0 support on the graphics card’s driver, otherwise it will fail over to using MESA if it knows where to find the library. I usedhttp://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/ to find out what version of OpenGL the driver supported, though there may well be better ways.

Maybe I should try the MESA software rendering with Minefield?

To launch a new proccess:

firefox.exe -no-remote
you need to tell Firefox where to find: 
open up about:config, and set the preference 
webgl.osmesalib to the path of OSMESA32.DLL

Are we done? No.

Error: gl.getShaderi is not a function

Source File: http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/webgl/spore/sporeview.js

Line: 31

Error: gl.getShaderi is not a functionSource File: http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/webgl/spore/sporeview.jsLine: 31

Are we done? Yes.

Software rendering seems to be very slow. The Minfield (almost) locks up.

So what else works?

1. Animated Cube
2. Lesson 1
3. Lesson 2
4. Lesson 3 – rotating, cool
5. Lesson 4 – rotating mesh, a little slower
6. Lesson 5 – rotating textured cube, quite slow
7. Lesson 6 – user rotated textured cube, rather slow
8. Lesson 7 – with light
9. Lesson 8 – transparent cube, very slow
10. Lesson 9 – moving objects
11. Lesson 10 – nano doom, too slow
12. Lesson 11 – sphere, too slow
13. Lesson 12 – rotating sphere with light – a little slow
14. Lesson 13 – too slow
15. Lesson 14 – teapot model, nice
16. Lesson 15 – rotating earth, too slow

Should jsc also support converting (C#, F#) IL to HLSL “x-shader/x-fragment“?

Would be cool to write a shader effect, debug it in Windows Presentation Foundation and run it in browser on javascript within WebGL.

Update:

OpenGL ES 2.0 is not supported on lots of common hardware. That means
there are a lot of machines that will not be able to run WebGL.

WebGL, being 100% dependent on JavaScript to do an application’s scene
graph, is going to have serious problems drawing more than a few pieces of
geometry at 60hz except in very special cases or on very fast machines