Porting GLToy to WebGL

[kpreid]

Started a new project, GLToyJS; I’m porting my GLToy to WebGL. The advantage, besides using a higher-level language and modern OpenGL (shaders!), is that it is more cross-platform, rather than being a Mac-only screensaver. The disadvantage is that it’s not a screensaver at all, but a web page; I plan to add a wrapper to fix that, and I have a working proof of concept.

So far I’ve put together the core framework and ported 6 of the original 13 effects (most of the in-my-current-opinion good ones, of course). An additional feature is that an effect’s parameters are described in JSON, which will be used to allow you to save a particularly good random result for future viewing. (I could just put them in the URL, in fact — I think I’ll try that next.)

I haven't yet created any new effects, so nothing takes obvious advantage of the additional capabilities provided by shaders (other than refinements such as Phong-rather-than-Gouraud lighting and GPU-side particle systems). I also wrote a sketchy compatibility layer for the GLSL Sandbox’s interface so that you can drop in a fragment shader from there to make an effect; a possible thing to do would be automatically downloading from their gallery (if politeness and copyright law permits).

It's not published as a web page anywhere yet, but it should be and I’ll let you know as soon as it is.