WebGL Water (2010)

220•gaws•9mo ago

Comments

90s_dev•9mo ago

On this note, can anyone recommend basic webgl 2d effects tutorial? I have a super exciting project I'm really close to announcing, but the last step is adding some pretty Animal Well style effects via webgl2, but I know practically nothing about webgl except the very very basics that you learn from webgl2fundamentals.org. Any pointers would be appreciated.

felipellrocha•9mo ago

Webgl2fundamentals is pretty great :)

kaesve•9mo ago

I like https://thebookofshaders.com/ . It’s unfinished and I don’t think it’s been updated in years, but what’s there is pretty good

jonplackett•9mo ago

I second this! Shame it’s still not finished though. I did this tutorial like 5 years ago

akomtu•9mo ago

shadertoy.com

90s_dev•9mo ago

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XXyGzh

... this is amazing!

I can't wait to dig in and figure out how to add effects like this over my 2d content!

dahart•9mo ago

It’s super easy. ShaderToy draws a rectangle on the screen and runs the given shader on it. There’s a small amount of plumbing to wire in a few variables like time & mouse position, and your texture coordinates. The rendering part of ShaderToy is simple enough that you can make your own clone in a day. The rest of the site is the hard part, the editor, the API & saving shaders in the cloud, getting lots of people to write awesome shaders, etc., but the rendering part is near trivial.

vhcr•9mo ago

The "problem" with it is that you only learn about fragment shaders, you should also learn about the WebGL API, and vertex shaders.

dahart•9mo ago

Not having to learn the API & vertex shaders is definitely a feature of ShaderToy, not a problem. :P The extremely low barrier to entry to writing shaders is one of it’s best qualities. Anyway, the question asked about 2d effects, so they maybe don’t need vertex shaders, and they can of course learn the small amount of WebGL API needed somewhere else like https://webgl2fundamentals.org/.

Exuma•9mo ago

This is my most voted submission. This thing literally never gets old

Exuma•9mo ago

Here is a trick: pause the simulation and drag the ripples back and forth really fast, it will create a "mega" wave. Then unpause and it will create a massive tsunami

quantadev•9mo ago

Or pause it and click the water surface 100 times to raise up a lot of potential energy that makes a very profound wave front when it comes down when you start it.

larodi•9mo ago

Demoscene never gets old, but why we get then so little submissions of it here? Demoscene reifies the creative-hacking culture, is it not?

a1371•9mo ago

Be the change you want to see

asadm•9mo ago

Wasnt this one of the demo that Figma co-founder used make a case for web-based editor?

ketzo•9mo ago

Saw the “made by Evan Wallace” and went “huh, that sounds familiar…”

Yeah, not surprising this guy went on to build Figma! Super cool

pentagrama•9mo ago

He push and work on the implementation of Rust [1] and WebAssembly [2] to the tool.

[1] https://medium.com/figma-design/rust-in-production-at-figma-...

[2] https://medium.com/figma-design/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-...

satvikpendem•9mo ago

As well as esbuild. I wonder what he's doing these days since he stepped out of Figma.

timschmidt•9mo ago

My Rust CAD library is based on his CSG.js: https://github.com/timschmidt/csgrs

Retr0id•9mo ago

This has always been my "is webgl working?" test page

Retr0id•9mo ago

By the way, I think it's (2011) not (2010)

notarealllama•9mo ago

Still. My god.

ByteAtATime•9mo ago

Back in 2010, this "require[d] a decent graphics card"

Now, my phone's integrated graphics can run it very smoothly. Moore's law at play.

ghkbrew•9mo ago

Here I am running just fine on a 3 year old phone

throw310822•9mo ago

It's running fine (not too smoothly but ok) on my 8 years old Xiaomi MI6.

moffkalast•9mo ago

My old phone is running it at exactly Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension fps

chris_pie•9mo ago

Same on a not-old Pixel 8

throw310822•9mo ago

Works well for me even on a 50€ (fifty euro!) chinese tablet I bought a few weeks ago.

corysama•9mo ago

Everyone forgets what machines are capable of if you actually optimize. This game did everything shown here in real time on phones 14 years ago https://youtu.be/JDvPIhCd8N4

TXCSwe•9mo ago

Have you heard of KKrieger? So yeah, if you optimize enough, machines can do quite cool stuff!

atiedebee•9mo ago

I think KKrieger required pretty beefy specs for the time. It's a different kind of optimization they were aiming for (code size Vs execution speed)

Although a friend of mine ran it on an integrated intel GPU recently and it performed great.

ashoeafoot•9mo ago

The in suit battery driven hamdwarmer he invented it!

qoez•9mo ago

I remember this running well on a low end macbook pro back then.

dustbunny•9mo ago

Is this open source?

dothack•9mo ago

https://github.com/evanw/webgl-water

earth2mars•9mo ago

If you are on Android try Kiwi browser to see this

vgb2k18•9mo ago

What does Kiwi do different? The water appears to work well on Brave.

notarealllama•9mo ago

5 year old low end Motorola Android with Firefox and ublock. Smooth as a baby's bottom. Genuinely surprised!

satvikpendem•9mo ago

Kiwi is deprecated by the way, use Firefox or just use Chrome which is what Kiwi was anyway.

chris_pie•9mo ago

Some features of Kiwi were merged to Edge, which means it now supports extensions (any extension if using developer options in Canary)

gitroom•9mo ago

Pretty cool how a basic demo like this still feels fresh, even on my old phone. Always makes me want to mess with web tech more.

bobajeff•9mo ago

I guess I'm the only one for whom this doesn't work I get:

'Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension'

_bin_•9mo ago

You must be on a very old browser, a terminal browser, ladybird, something like that. PEBCAK. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OES_texture...

fbrchps•9mo ago

I'm also getting the error on Android, latest Chrome.

moffkalast•9mo ago

Latest Firefox on Android does seem to work, oddly enough. How the turntables...

bobajeff•9mo ago

Nope. Using Chrome 136.0.7103.87 on Android.

JonoW•9mo ago

Getting this error on a brand new Pixel 9 Pro, latest Chrome. Odd

Maken•9mo ago

Install Firefox. Not joking.

ricardobeat•9mo ago

When this was made in 2010 mobile phones had no WebGL support at all.

Ironically Chrome was also the only browser that supported it without beta flags, looks like their mobile version never caught up.

landgenoot•9mo ago

When you move the ball up, but keep it still under water, you'll see the water level rise.

Why?

tomcam•9mo ago

To encourage you to file a PR

NetOpWibby•9mo ago

This is incredible. My goodness.

pjmlp•9mo ago

After all these years, Android Chrome still doesn't support the extensions required by this demo, this is the issue with Web 3D adoption.

throw310822•9mo ago

Works fine for me.

pjmlp•9mo ago

Actually, I just cross-checked on WebGL Report, and it does indeed support the extension, not that changes having a black page complaining the extension is missing.

ankit_mishra•9mo ago

Same for me on. Getting this error - Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension WebGL Water

Using - Chrome 136.0.7103.87 Android 15;

Traubenfuchs•9mo ago

…so how does water look like in 2025 on WebGPU?

fulafel•9mo ago

This is probably the first time (not counting ignored times) it was been posted which doesn't have comments about breakage on some browser.

Makes you wonder how long it takes that WebGPU reaches the same status.

kelnos•9mo ago

I see three such comments, all posted before you posted. Oh well. I'd hoped you were right about this.

fulafel•9mo ago

Ah, I didn't reload before writing the comment. Oh well.

chrisjj•9mo ago

"Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension WebGL Water Made by Evan Wallace

This demo requires a decent graphics card and up-to-date drivers. If you can't run the demo, you can still see it on YouTube.

Interactions: Draw on the water to make ripples Drag the background to rotate the camera Press SPACEBAR to pause and unpause Drag the sphere to move it around Press the L key to set the light direction Press the G key to toggle gravity Features: Raytraced reflections and refractions Analytic ambient occlusion Heightfield water simulation * Soft shadows Caustics (see this for details) * * requires the OES_texture_float extension * requires the OES_standard_derivatives extension" on Android Chrome.

A_Stefan•9mo ago

This example never ceases to amaze

andrewrn•9mo ago

Very cool!

Something I noticed is that you can’t make perturbations on the surface of the water by rapidly moving the ball beneath the water.

Don’t have time to dig into the sim to know why, but that is a monitor flaw.

Later edit: ah, looks like rendering was the focus not sim, per the maker’s website.

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WebGL Water (2010)

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