This really shows me how far removed are interactive experiences in a browser as opposed to running natively in an operating system.
Nothing about this game should tax the resources of a mid-level computer from the late 1990s, yet when running inside of a browser, you'd think you were asking your computer to run Crysis at maximum resolution.
Not to disagree with your fundamental point -- JavaScript and WebGL has a ways to go yet -- but what computer are you thinking of? 1999 was the year of Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life, which looked like this[0] with fully-baked maps. This game smoothly renders thousands of dynamic polys with shading and stencil shadows, not to mention anti-aliased typography, at 1440x900 with about 30% CPU on my MBA. It's a little more impressive than you make it sound.
This being the top comment, I'm assuming it got upvoted the most, but nobody chimed in verbal agreement.
I'm posting from a 2007 Compaq 8510p with Windows XP, and having the browser bog down as if I've been hacked has been the sharpest reminder of late I need to upgrade.
This is fantastic work. I'm genuinely impressed every day when I come to HN with all of the fantastic work that is being produced and very humbled at the same time (realising my own limits!).
What we can do in a web-browser now, and the ability of excellent engineers such as these guys to implement these is astonishing.
it probably does but if you are running a stable version of Chrome so your gpu might be blacklisted (I think some gpus aren't entirely stable enough for the stable version of Chrome)
Run Chrome with the --ignore-gpu-blacklist flag and it should work. (you might also have to turn on webgl in the about:flags settings page - also maybe NaCL in about:flags and about:plugins)
This solves it for me, and I believe it also will for others. Everytime I wanna see something in WebGL I have to open a new Chrome window using --ignore-gpu-blacklist and then it works. This was the same.
I have 18.0.1025.165 too, and according to that page, everything is hardware accelerated. Though I have Intel GMA 950 from the long forgotten times of 2007, so that might be it.
That's pretty much what I thought. I just wonder what the marble madness developers might think of seeing this. what would they have said to using maps of the real world with live traffic streamed in to the game to roll your marble around?
Nothing about this game should tax the resources of a mid-level computer from the late 1990s, yet when running inside of a browser, you'd think you were asking your computer to run Crysis at maximum resolution.