We are releasing a “vertical slice” of our new game tech demo, Ooman. Ultimately, our goal is to make Ooman an immersive 3-D puzzle platformer in a “real” virtual environment. This means full use of three spatial dimensions with smooth camera interpolation from any angle. The demo highlights the 3D environment tech using WebGL including our camera model and character motion system.
The key thing here is: this is smooth, 3D game play native in a web browser!
Ooman demonstrates our webGL Game Engine, including a scene graph system and smooth rigid-body motion interpolation. We chose an abstract but consistent artistic style to save on game art costs but provide a high-quality and high-resolution experience.
Ooman features an easy-to-use click-to-move character command system as well as the traditional WASD+QE controls. All motion and camera angles are gimbal-lock-free and can be controlled with nothing more than the left mouse button. When webGL is available for tablet computers, touch support will be trivial.
We are also releasing three small open source libraries to make WebGL development a little less oh-my-painful:
- webgl-noise is a set of 2-, 3-, and 4-D simplex noise routines which use no array or texture resources but remain fast
- webgl-diagnostic is a collection of Javascript utility functions for generating diagnostic reports about the local WebGL execution environment
- webgl-decomment is a set of GLESSL comment stripping routines in C++, Javascript, Perl, and OCaml
We’re going to use this basic engine for future projects, including our lunar explorer and 3D model display tool…