Category Archives: Ashima Arts

Here’s a great example of our noise function used to power a beautiful piece of 3D art in WebGL.  Click on the image to go check it out (with a WebGL-enabled browser, of course…)

So we have finally got the contracts in place to start work on a cool interface to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter moon data and modeling coming out of the Diviner team at UCLA. The idea is to re-use the indexing system we developed to localize game events on a true-world-sized virtual planet. We are taking that same game engine and using it to aid in model and display Diviner data and thermal model maps in real-time.  And by real-time, I mean full 3D at (hopefully) FPS game speed, and in a web browser using HTML5 technologies!

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As part of our Ooman game tech demo release, we open-sourced some code including a new implementation of simplex noise.  Noise is a key component of making procedural game assets: instead of loading in a texture for marble or clouds (or most materials), you can calculate these noisy aspects of nature on the fly, and at different resolutions.

For webGL (and for a few other applications), current implementations of noise are problematic because of resource demands.  Our version of noise fixes these issues and has been gaining notice in the community.  Check out this post from WebGL.org:

“Mar 17, 2011 – Since its inception, GLSL has sadly lacked native support for noise(). A few GLSL implementations of Perlin noise have been presented over the years, but now it seems like we have a winner. Ian McEwan of Ashima Arts has come up with a very clever version of “simplex noise” that requires neither texture access nor arrays. It is compatible with WebGL, it is a set of self-contained GLSL functions with no external dependencies, and it runs fast. A demo with full source code has been posted to the GLSL developer’s forum.”

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!

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“Click friction” is the drain on a game’s potential player base associated with making the player jump through hurdles to get to the game.  A major hurdle is the client download – people hate waiting for software to download and are afraid that what they’re downloading might actually be a virus.  But the flip side of the problem – building a game that doesn’t require a client or plug-in download – usually means poor quality 2D or isomorphic ’3D’ graphics.  Here’s where WebGL comes in.

WebGL is a piece of the new HTML5 standard, and it allows direct access to the graphics card from the browser.  With WebGL, the same kinds of 3D graphical environments that can be built with OpenGL / OpenGL ES can now be built right into the browser.  In principle, a player could be in a game with a single click and from any browser on any platform (so long as the browser supports the modern HTML5 standard and has non-antiquated graphics cards / drivers).  The WebGL standard is still developing, but here’s an example of a demo game room to give some idea of the possibilities: