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Cool, Steven Wittens is behind this. The header at https://acko.net/ https://acko.net/ is one of the first examples of WebGL I remember seeing in the wild, and

• kllrnohj 4y ago
  The first practical usage of WebGL in the wild I can think of would be Google Maps, although it's easy to forget about the switch from the old server-side tiles to the vector WebGL thingy ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3EO_zehMkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3EO_zehMkM ). The still strikes me as one of the very few useful usages of WebGL that exists even today. There's other usages of course, like figma, sketchup, etc... But those rarely (if ever) benefit from the web's primary advantages of ephemeral & linkability, and would work perfectly fine as just classic desktop apps. Kinda like an awful lot of tools in those spaces still are. Majority usage of webgl still seems to otherwise be ads & shopping. It seems likely that webgpu is going to be much of the same, although it has a chance of graduating out of the web platform as a potentially useful middleware abstraction for native apps that want to use the GPU.
  • starburst 4y ago
    How can you forget about games? The reason GPU exists in the first place.
    • kllrnohj 4y ago
      Browser-based games died with the death of flash. WebGL(2) didn't bring them back, and WebGPU isn't going to, either.
      • paulgb 4y ago
        Why not? I'm not a game developer, but between WebGPU and QUIC+WebTransport enabling UDP in the browser, I've been cautiously optimistic that web gaming will see a revival.
        • oefrha 4y ago
          Flash gaming was hugely successful largely because the authoring tools were excellent and truly accessible. WebGPU on the other hand is like one or two orders or magnitude less accessible (as it currently stands) than typical modern game dev, which is itself nothing compared to what Flash was back in the day. So on the one hand you have a tiny number of diehard tech nerds who can deliver some labor of love, and on the other hand you have gaming companies/studios, for whom the business case of shipping games constrained to low tens of MBs is largely nonexistent.
          • zppln 4y ago
            Plus I would assume that game devs of today would rather serve up their games for a few bucks on Steam rather than for free through the web.
          • joveian 4y ago
            Flash still exists if you want it, it is just called Haxe now. Both major and a number of minor game development platforms can publish to the web. Checking itch.io there were 120 web based games uploaded within the past day (includes updates I assume). I would guess there are more now than ever before, but because there are more easily available commercial games for very little money on sale more people just get commercial games. Or download free games, which gives better controls than a browser. Although the games market in general is so much larger now that I'm not conviced there are fewer people interested in web games than previously. I suspect it is more a case of people who were personally interested in web games previously and aren't now thinking that it is no longer a thing.
          • CharlesW 4y ago
            > Flash gaming was hugely successful largely because the authoring tools were excellent and truly accessible. Adobe Flash Professional still exists as Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
            • starburst 4y ago
      • theK 4y ago
        I thought that community just migrated to unity and the other alternatives that Export to HTML. Isn't even the next unreal engine supposed to have an export to web feature?
        • starburst 4y ago
          They do but they never got something as good, it's multiple megabytes for a single empty scene with a long initialization time and doesn't run as well as it should (especially on mobile) when you consider old flash games were running on old pentium could be just a few kb and started instantly (and were 1 single streamable file). If you are only targeting the web, you're better off with a game engine specific to the web.
        • intelVISA 4y ago
          Epic already abandoned the Emscripten toolchain sadly.
      • yesimahuman 4y ago
        Vampire Survivors, currently the most popular game on Steam Deck, is browser based and built w WebGL, Phaser, and Capacitor. I agree games like this have been rare but perhaps we’re about to hit a turning point https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors
        • bmn__ 4y ago
  • flyteuk 4y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm understanding what you mean about "linkability", but when I'm writing up something on Notion, I'm able to refer to specific elements of a Figma drawing and have the preview rendered right there in Notion. As far as I'm aware, it also updates along with the Figma drawing.
  • gfxgirl 4y ago
    meet and other video messaging apps use the GPU to blur or replace your background before streaming you video to their services
• JusticeJuice 4y ago
  Oh man, I remember finding this site years ago, I had completely forgot about it. What a piece of internet nostalgia.