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Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10
- mmastrac 12y agoUgh: 'we developed a patent-pending solution called “ZyGL”.' While there are a bunch of people working to make stuff performant on browsers, Zynga comes in from behind and starts patenting barely-novel stuff on top of it.
- tyho 12y agoRelevant patent I think: https://www.google.com/patents/US20130088491 https://www.google.com/patents/US20130088491 If the emscripten lot had decided to patent "Method to reconstruct flow structures from binary machine code" then Zynga would not have the privilege of porting their game to the web in the first place.
- robterrell 12y agoActually, that's not the relevant patent. That patent is for a technique for hardware-accelerated 2D animations using 3D meshes on the GPU, and was used for the game Dream Zoo.
- Alupis 12y agoNot to mention IE10 is already Old. I lost a little more respect for Zynga today.
- themartorana 12y agoYou had any left?
- _random_ 12y agoHopefully they will be able to extend and extinguish as well, so that the so called "open web" (that is actually pretty much closed to different languages and technologies, unless you are willing to use crap-trans-pilation crutch like Emscripten) or at least WebGL will die as it should. All the best to Zynga!
- lunixbochs 12y agoUnfortunately, a successful patent here could block my non-web work in this area :(
- epoelke 12y agoZynga? Whats a Zynga?
- kazinator 12y agoIt's a word that you say when you're not kidding. Zynga! Yes, I really am trying to patent the obvious, with loads of prior art. Its opposite is "bazinga", which means "I was kidding".
- moron4hire 12y agoI asked a patent office employee about this. Apparently, a thing is only prior art if it is patented itself, or is published in an accepted academic journal, and then only if such things can be found in the ten hours the examiner is given per patent application.
- moron4hire 12y agoSo ZyGL is basically the software rasterizer we all had to write in college graphics algorithms? So ZyGL is basically nothing more than Three.js, sans the option to render in SVG elements? And they want to patent this? Sorry for the language, but seriously, fuck these guys. What complete trolls. This is completely unacceptable. Software rasterization fallback has been a thing forever. Actually, you know, longer than OpenGL of any flavor. Cuz that used to be the only way you could do graphics. Is there any way I can help to get this patent blocked? And how do we go about shaming young developers into not joining Zynga just because it's a "game" company? This isn't the first unethical thing they've done.
- kazinator 12y agoYes; please join the "Ask Patents" stackexchange site: http://patents.stackexchange.com/ http://patents.stackexchange.com/ This site is exactly for this reason: raising patent questions with the goal of identifying bad patents. "Ask Patents is a question and answer site for people interested in improving and participating in the US patent system. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to find Prior Art on dangerous and overly broad US Patent Applications before they become issued Patents. "
- Alupis 12y agoIt's been said before, but I'll say it again: The USPTO does not and will not look at nor use an end-user forums like "Ask Patents" for the basis of any decision.
- realusername 12y agoI don't want to spoil their great "innovation patent" but Three.js has implemented this years ago (http://threejs.org/docs/#Reference/Renderers/CanvasRenderer http://threejs.org/docs/#Reference/Renderers/CanvasRenderer).
- mbrubeck 12y agoDoes that reconstruct quads as the Zynga post described? From the source code, it seems to just draw the triangles individually: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/1769fbfc6c994b51a54c15a5c096855fd3cb8a1a/src/renderers/CanvasRenderer.js#L634-L646 https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/1769fbfc6c994b51a54c... I also don't see any heuristic processing of shaders as described for ZyGL.
- razh 12y agothree.js removed support for quads to reduce renderer complexity. https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Face4.js https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Face... https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/88092284cbe07723fe2bd677ee594faf948521d4/src/renderers/CanvasRenderer.js#L836 https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/88092284cbe07723fe2b... And the relevant issue: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/3663 https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/3663
- mbrubeck 12y agoEven before that change, I don't see any code that automatically reconstructs construct quads from pairs of triangles. But maybe I'm missing something?
- razh 12y agoNo, you're right, there's no quad reconstruction. I imagine you could have just used quads in both the WebGL and Canvas renderers to achieve a similar effect.
- lunixbochs 12y ago
- vernie 12y agoThis is all kinds of gross. Way to stay relevant, Zynga.
- pnt12 12y ago>"today we wanted to share some of what we learned in the process" >"To tackle this issue we developed a patent-pending solution" At first I was surprised, it looked like Zynga was doing something nice for a change. In the end, it seems all they're sharing is the bad news.
- yuhong 12y agoAs a side note, the August cumulative update for IE11 has improved WebGL support. I hope they are testing their games with it.