Hey guys. I'm the original author of the engine. (I go by "MarkTheEchidna" on Sonic Retro) I'm really surprised to see this popular here on Hacker News. :-)

I'm having problems opening the forum thread on Retro right now. If that's also happening to you, you can grab/fork the source code here:

https://github.com/coreh/WebSonic

It's MIT licensed. The art is under Creative Commons. The code is kinda messy, since this was done just for fun/learning WebGL.

As lewispb pointed out, you can play it at:

http://achene.co/WebSonic/

"http://achene.co/WebSonic/

Aren't you missing the top-level domain there? (i.e. it doesn't resolve for me, and googling only gives me .co, which won't resolve)

Tried it on both FF4 and Chromium 10 on ubuntu and both got this error:

  Error: Nonexistent or unused uniform in the description of shader shader/sky.jsonshader: u_normalCameraViewError: Nonexistent or unused uniform in the description of shader shader/sky.jsonshader: u_normalCameraView at http://achene.co/WebSonic/js/GraphicsEngine.js:96:11 at Array.forEach (native) at new (http://achene.co/WebSonic/js/GraphicsEngine.js:93:23) at Object.success (http://achene.co/WebSonic/js/ResourceManager.js:80:20) at success (http://achene.co/WebSonic/lib/jquery.js:5267:15) at XMLHttpRequest. (http://achene.co/WebSonic/lib/jquery.js:5207:7)

In FF4 you can try setting webgl.shader_validator = false. Sometimes it helps to get "something" rendered when things would fail completely otherwise.

This is really impressive. I wasn't expecting WebGL to come on this strong, this quickly (game engines using Canvas have taken much longer to reach this level of maturity). I'm not sure I see the advantage of NaCl now. This runs flawlessly in Chrome.

I would have to agree. Pushing the canvas to the edge you can only do so much, but it looks like you could do much more with webgl. Does anyone know of any tech demos of 2d games backed by webgl?

Simply amazing. It is so smooth in chrome 10 on win7.

Too bad that we have to worry about MS and IE not supporting it. Maybe there will be a plugin, but that defeats the purpose.

  Too bad that we have to worry about MS and IE not supporting it.

It is long past the time for the web development community to abandon this mentality. Look at how fast the web has progressed without Microsoft. Once WebGL is available in tablets (and I guarantee you they will), then you'll have a huge audience capable of playing these games.

Additionally it doesn't make sense in the case of games. What is the alternative here? Make it a downloadable exe? If they can download a game, they can download Chrome.

The attitude only makes sense in the case of content, when a less stylish webpage is a viable alternative.

Or you can just add a few lines of javascript and have Chrome Frame install in IE. Users will think they're installing the game itself.

I agree, I personally feel that as web devs with four other major browers that basically follow the same standards, we should spend our time targeting them. But to simply ignore the MS/IE user base is pure ignorance.

I had a hand in porting a chrome-only app (embark.delta.com) over to all browsers and we had to remove all of the "cool" advances just to get it to work with ie9. Bottom line is that the combo of MS/IE still, and will for a while, retard the progression that is being made.

As long as IE is player, we'll have to say "fuck, but what about IE?" when we see cool new advances. This is why I am happy about the mobile browser landscape

Google Chrome Frame fits the bill there.

What will most likely happen is that MS will release web direct x and we'll begin to see a bunch of libraries (a lot like the js ones) that create a common interface for advanced graphics in a browser.

> Maybe there will be a plugin, but that defeats the purpose.

Well, what's wrong with a plugin? There's some great stuff written in Unity, which runs on every browser for Windows and Mac, with Linux support coming in the nearish future.

And frankly, it looks and performs much much better than anything I've seen in WebGL.

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2011/03/browser_game_pick_beg...

Incredible, playable here:

http://achene.co/WebSonic/

Damn, I guess we can expect to see some pretty serious games in the browser.

blast this in a background tab http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxImkPH2G40&feature=relat...

This works flawlessly (and sooo smooth, even in fullscreen mode at 1920x1200) in my Firefox 4 on Windows XP. And Microsoft said XP couldn't do the modern Web.