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Yeah, I didn't know the specifics of this sim, I just wanted to clarify the advantages of WebGL for even 2D stuff. The OffscreenCanvas thing sounds awesome! I

• moron4hire 6y ago
  Yes, that is definitely true. I use it for text rendering, myself. Getting text rendering working in shader code is pretty difficult and gives pretty low quality results. You have to create a glyph map for all the characters you plan to render--which also means you have to plan ahead of time what text you're going to render--and you are stuck with only one color for all of the text (there are some multicolor SDF-based systems, but they aren't very common). So I render the text in a 2D rendering context, with all the fancy bells and whistles and support for changing fonts on the fly and colors and transformations and a sane API, in a Worker, save off an ImageBitmap object from it, transfer that ImageBitmap back to the main thread, and use it as a texture on 3D geometry. I also use 3D contexts in Workers to do some pre-processing on textures, like converting equirectangular skymaps into rectalinear cubemaps. The worker is setup to be able to preload these images while the user is doing other things, then transfer the results when they are needed during a scene transition, so the scene transition is nearly instanteous.