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WebGL: OpenGL ES 2.0 for the Web

2 minute read

As an OpenGL junkie I just have to dedicate at least one post to this topic.

By now you’ve undoubtedly heard of OpenGL ES, the OpenGL based library used on embedded devices such as cell phones and gaming consoles. OpenGL ES is what gives many Android based phones and iPhones their 3D gaming capabilities that rival the desktop machines of only a few years ago in terms of power. It seems like these days we’re all carrying a little computer in our pocket.

One of the only areas that didn’t have hardware accelerated 3D graphics up to this point was the web browser. There have been many talks about 3D browser graphics throughout the years and many more plug-ins, but nothing concrete or long lasting. This is about to change with the development of WebGL, which is a library based on OpenGL ES accessible through ECMAScript (which is basically a fancy name for JavaScript).

Yes, you’ve read that correctly: you’ll be able to use hardware accelerated graphics through JavaScript.

This opens up a myriad of possibilities for online games that were previously almost exclusive to Adobe Flash, which is a proprietary platform and requires a browser plug-in. WebGL on the other hand will be as native to your browser and as standardized as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. And being based on OpenGL ES, you’ll have access to all the goodies that come with it such as Buffer Objects (VBOs, etc.) and GLSL shaders.

The WebGL context will be bound to the HTML 5 <canvas> element, which will serve the exact same function as a device context in OpenGL — you pretty much can’t get more generic and platform independent than that.

Currently, a widely supported WebGL implementation is still in the future but it’s coming closer by the day since we already see implementations in the beta versions of Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 5. This means that if you’re interested in WebGL and want to get an advantage, you can already pick up a copy of on of these browsers, read the draft specification, read some documentation and tutorials, and start building WebGL applications.

There are already a few (very impressive) examples out there showcasing the potential of WebGL, I’ve listed a few below and if you know any more, drop a link in a comment.

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How I Track Tasks and Take Notes

4 minute read

A bunch of notebooks

I’ve been keeping track of my notes and daily tasks using a single method for over a decade, and it works pretty well for me. Someone close to me asked me how I keep track of everything without losing track, so I figured I’d outline it here. The system is easy to use and relatively loose but with enough structure to be consistent.

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Foundry VTT on DigitalOcean with SSL and PM2

9 minute read

Foundry Virtual Tabletop Screenshot

I absolutely LOVE Foundry Virtual Tabletop (FoundryVTT). It is by far the best $50 I’ve spent on my tabletop role-playing hobby in years. I can gush about the software on and on, and perhaps I will in a future post. This post, however, focuses on something a bit more practical.

For years, I’ve hosted my instance on AWS, but with the change to their public IP address pricing, it doesn’t make sense to stay with them since DigitalOcean offers a beefier solution at a lower monthly cost.

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Creating and Publishing a Bluesky Feed

9 minute read

Bluesky terminal feed output

I was recently invited to join Bluesky, a new social media platform. This was mostly motivated by the nightmare that Twitter has become over the past year or so. One of Bluesky’s nice features is the encouragement from the official team to build supplementary software. One way to do it is to build a custom feed. So, I set out to do just that: I built a feed that serves all posts related to TTRPGs on Bluesky. Here’s how I went about publishing mine on a DigitalOcean droplet using PM2, Nginx, and Let’s Encrypt.

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