Canvas 3d JS Library

During GDC this year, Kronos announced it’s plan to create an open standard for accelerated 3D on the web. Canvas 3D, the technology that this library is built on, is one way that this may be achieved.  Since the announcement was made a new version of Canvas 3D (0.4.2) has been released.  This new version works with Firefox 3.5 which is due to be released in the next few months.  For those wanting to try out the new extension, you can use a nightly build of the browser.

Our 0.8 release of this library however does not work with the new extension.  There were several changes to the api that is the reason for this.  Furthermore, the other signficant change in the 0.4.2 release of the extension is the removal of support for the gles1.1 renderer.  This means that many of our examples that were done using the 1.1 context as well as our tutorial.  In general the code change for this is not that difficult.  Our library had been written to change the renderer by switching only one line in the code.  Some demos however are not working quite the same as it was.  Some of the issues are due to the fact that we added changes to the code hiearchy refactorization.  The other is that we have not yet fully optimized our code and it is a bit more sluggish than the old code.

In any case our library is now updated for the new extension.  If you are using Canvas3d 0.4.2 you can now download our library release 1.0.  The 1.0 release of the library no longer has the gles 1.1 renderer.  If you have written code with the old library using version 0.7 or later and find that it does not work, you should check if you are using the gles 2.0 renderer or the gles 1.1 renderer.  switch the line that says:

renderer = new c3dl.OpenGLES11();

renderer = new c3dl.OpenGLES20();