The Virtual Laboratory

I had to share this, the most calming, divine and soothing music I have found during my travels along the digital highway…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0907_J_xRSU
http://www.youtube.com/user/PaulFromStokeuk
http://www.paulfromstokeuk.com

The guys over at http://www.fiveminutes.eu/ asked me to demonstrate how to load and texture map a complex 3D model using my JavaScript 3D engine so I put together a small demo which loads an awesome space fighter by Angryfly along with its colour texture map and renders this against a point light source.

Check out the demo, I get around 60fps look at it from the top.

So I decided to experiment with WebGL and a JavaScript 3D engine called Three.js by Mr doob. Click on the pic to try it out…
The colour combinations and patterns coupled with the bloom effect are truly mesmerizing. I am considering writing a Windows screen saver using this.

• Left click and drag mouse to rotate the shape.
• Middle click and drag mouse to zoom in and out.
• Right click and drag mouse to move camera.

Note that this demo, like most, will only run on HTML5 browsers such as Chrome 10 or Firefox 4.0 and above.

A few years back, around 2001-2002 if I remember correctly, I wrote and published a Java Tron light cycles called Z-Tron.

At the time I was figuring out how to implement machine intelligence that would exhibit basic tactics and strategy.

I played around with genetic algorithms and after a few attempts manage to get a rather interesting critter with decent obstacle avoidance skills, but not much in terms of tactics or strategy

Click on the image to play.

If anyone is interested I will release the code, but it isn’t pretty

I have decided not to minify or obfuscate the JavaScript sources for my experiments. This way I hope to encourage sharing of knowledge and new ideas.

There are some very clever people out there who I hope can help me improve my JavaScript coding skills and hopefully there is something here that can teach or inspire others too.

Additionally and unless otherwise stated to the contrary all scripts may be used freely by anyone for any purpose.

Update: Multi-Threaded Java Version uploaded

So thanks to another bank holiday weekend I decided to write up another demo to see just how far I could push the V8 JavaScript engine of Google Chrome and the result is: a Quake 3 map viewer using a software 3D engine. For those of you from another galaxy Quake 3 Arena is a kick ass first person shooter which I still play to this day at Quake Live.

A couple of things:

• Bilinear filtering is only done for lightmaps
• No transparency support

Also I am not sure if using the original Quake 3 assets is permitted, but Q3DM7 is honestly the best map ever created IMHO, so if there is any issue please inform me and I will change this to a mod map.

Okay my fellow cybercitizens, I would like to know if there is any interest in my developing a fully fledged JavaScript 3D engine which doesn’t use WebGL?
At the moment I am going down the WebGL route since honestly it is friggin awesome, however I understand that WebGL might limit the number of end users targeted since no version of Internet Explorer natively supports WebGL (and I suspect never will), so….

1) Is there much interest in a software only 3D engine
2) What features would you like to see
3) How would you use such an engine

p.s. All comments on this site are moderated and filtered so spammers go away!

Uploaded some new experiments and created an niffty looking index page.

The Mandelbrot generator does a comparison between JavaScript and Java and using Chrome 12 and above it almost is able to keep up… whoot!

The other is a work in progress ray tracer which allows editing using the awesome Ace (Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor)

One thing I have found useful when programming in Java which is lacking in C# is anonymous classes, sure this is easily resolved by simply creating an inner class implementing the target interface but options are always a good thing, so I messed around with dynamic proxies (Castle Project) coupled with the anonymous types and came up with this little example Dynamo.

Maybe someone might find this useful, again any comments or suggestions are welcome.

I’ve been getting quite a number of requests to release my JavaScript 3D code to the world in some fashion or another… so after some cleaning up it is done and ready for release. For usage examples look at the demos on this site.

You can download the code and use it in anyway you like so long as you adhere to the license. Should you wish to use this engine for commercial purposes contact me so we may discuss licensing.

Also any recommendations or suggestions about how to improve this engine in any way are welcome.