Protecting WebGL content (and why you probably shouldn't)

I received an email this morning from a developer that is in a predicament that I think many WebGL developers will find themselves in pretty soon:

Do you have any experience with protecting assets in WebGL? I wrote a quick solution to protect textures during transfer - base64 encoding + concat server side and splitting + creating imgs client side. Still, using WebGL Inspector I can get all textures transferred to the graphics card. I wonder if you have any ideas on how to prevent that. I don't mind open sourcing my apps, but my clients apparently do :)

Ah, that last line is really the crux of the matter, isn't it? Most developers I know don't mind sharing their creations with the world at large, as we tend to understand that there's rarely anything sacred and secret in the lines of code we crank out, but that's not always an easy thing to convince management of. So: What's an enterprising WebGL developer to do when the boss decrees from on high "Protect our content?"

There's a couple ways to approach such a request, in my opinion. First: Do whatever you can to convince said management that you don't need to protect said content. Second: Convince them harder. Third: If all else fails, obscure the content as much as possible. I'll be talking about both approaches in todays post.

Compressed Textures in WebGL

[UPDATE: The compressed textures spec has been changing, and so the original code posted with this entry stopped running. I've since fixed the code and updated the information below. Be aware, though, that the spec may STILL be tweaked at some point!]

I gave a presentation this last Friday at WebGL Camp 4, the slides of which are online now. I had a great time, met some awesome developers, and saw a lot of things that got me really excited about the future of WebGL. I highly encourage anyone that is interested in WebGL to try and make it to WebGL Camp 6!

During my talk I was able to show what I think may be the first public demo of compressed textures in WebGL! The demo isn't terribly impressive, it simply displays a DXT5 texture loaded from a DDS file, but it shows off the required code effectively enough.

http://media.tojicode.com/webgl-samples/dds.html

(Warning: That demo will only work on machines that support DXT5 compression. That should be most desktops, but the majority of mobile or tablet devices will be out of luck! You'll also need to be running a fairly new Chrome dev channel build)

Yay! I got a textured cube on screen! Surely I'm the first person ever to do this!

Okay, yeah... it's not all that impressive. The key here is the potential that it provides. Compressed textures have been an integral part of 3D games and many other 3D applications on the desktop, console, and mobile platforms that they've become something of an invisible, pervasive optimization that everyone tends to take for granted. Up until now, however, they've been something that's been left out of WebGL (not without reason, they're tricky to get right). The fact that we're gaining the ability to use them now is, in my view, something of a benchmark of the maturity of the standard.

So what exactly do we mean by compressed texture? If you're not already familiar with the concept from a prior life as a game developer it can be a bit confusing to really grok what we're referring to and why it matters. After all, JPEGs and PNGs are compressed images, right? What's different here?

Building the Game: Part 5 - Static Level Geometry

See the code for this post, or all posts in this series.
See the live demo.

(WARNING! The live demo for this post will probably take a while to load and will most likely not run at 60 FPS! Optimizations will come in later posts.)


Sorry about the long gap in posts, but this has proven to be one of the more challenging things I've attempted so far. That's primarily been because I wasn't too familiar with how Unity handled things behind the scenes until I started working on this particular post. I've found some surprising (and occasionally disappointing) things about how Unity handles it's levels, and it's forced me to rethink a couple of aspects of this project, but I think I've got a decent handle on it now and at this point the order of the day is progress in small increments.


To that end, we're going to start talking about exporting, displaying, and interacting with levels from Unity, but we're going to do so one step at a time. Today's step is simply going to be getting the level geometry and lighting information exported and rendering brute force. We're not going to be worrying about collision detection, visibility culling, or anything else right now than just getting those triangles out of Unity and into our browser! 

Thoughts on the iPhone after switching from Android

In the last few months, for various different reasons, I've had been looking to upgrade my beloved Droid X. There was a lot back and forth on my part about which phone to get, as I considered Android heavyweights like the Bionic and Galaxy Nexus, but at the end of the day Android was having a hard time really impressing me with it's latest and greatest. I've been pretty vocal in the past about my love of Android phones, and at one point even wrote a blog post about why the thought of me getting an iPhone was pretty absurd. And yet... today I've got an iPhone in my pocket, and I couldn't be happier with the decision!

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about why I made the switch (I've already ranted on Google+ about that.) But it did want to mention a few pros and cons about the switch, to help out anyone else who's wondering which way they want to go.

iPhone Pros:

• UI Fluidity: I've got the latest and greatest iPhone now (4S), but even going back and playing with a 3GS there's simply no questions that Apple's UI is snappier than Android in just about every way. Android has gotten better, but even the much anticipated Ice Cream Sandwich doesn't quite match the iPhone's effortless interactions and transitions. (And yes, I've played with an ICS device.)
• Better Browser: On a professional level, as a web developer, this was a very compelling reason to switch. Thing is, I use Chrome exclusively on the desktop so I have a lot of faith that Google can make a great  browser. They just haven't on the phone. Once again, ICS makes strides towards this, but it's still not at the "Chrome on your Phone" point that we really want. Apple, on the other hand, has delivered "Safari on your phone" quite nicely. It's a very fast, robust browser that's pretty close to desktop level in terms of capabilities. If you're developing for the mobile web, Safari is what you target before putting hacks in place to support everyone else.
• More Stable: It was rare that I could go for more than a few weeks without having to battery pull my Droid X. Even when I didn't have to reboot though I had to manually kill off rouge apps more that I wanted to. On iOS I've never had to kill a misbehaving app (although my Wife often has issues with Facebook, but I'm happy to blame that one on a shoddy app.) and I've rebooted exactly once, to install a new OS update. Oh, and speaking of which...
• OS Updates, when they happen: On Android, even with the best of manufacturers, you were looking at many months between the time Google said "Here's Android 2.x! Have fun!" and the time that you could actually get it on your phone (in skinned, unstable, bloatware infested form). With iOS, I was able to upgrade to the latests version the day it came out. That's pretty spectacular, from a developers point of view.
• Keep your grubby hands off my phone! I have exactly 0 Verizon apps on my phone, which is the same number that came pre-installed on it. I don't have a Verizon logo anywhere on my phone. I don't have some special, unremovable skin, and I don't have random social networking bloatware that can't be turned off. Obviously this is possible, but apparently Apple is the only manufacturer that's willing to make an argument for the consumer when it comes to carrier installed crud. I appreciate that more than I can possibly express.
• Accessories: Everyone and their dog makes iPhone accessories. Motorola makes Droid accessories. Guess which one yields the better selection? (Oh, and I love being able to buy headphones that actually include a working mic and inline volume!)
• The Screen: This one is a bit love and hate, but first with the love. With every Android phone on the planet (even the almighty Galaxy Nexus!) shrugging their shoulders and says "PenTile is good enough" Apple's retina display really shines. People, this is what a phone screen should look like! No dithered colors, no jagged edges, no funky refresh rates. Just beautiful, high DPI goodness.
• The Camera: I don't even want to try comparing my Droid X's camera to this one. It's cruel.
• The Apps: This, right here, is the big daddy of switching reasons. Look, I love Android. I really do. But let's face it guys: the Apps kinda suck. For one, Apple's store has a larger selection of apps, and far more platform exclusives (especially if you care about games!) But even for those apps that do have an Android counterpart, the Android version is usually the neglected stepchild compared to the iOS app (Pandora, this still means you!) or you may not be able to run the app at all, due to hardware/software incompatibilities (Netflix, anyone?) And then there's the fact that even assuming that you get a great app that works well it's probably already been out on iOS for months before they bothered to port it, and will likely always be behind in getting updates. The fact is: Apple's App selection and quality makes Android's Market feel kinda laughable. Sorry, but it's true.

iPhone Cons:

• The information is in there... somewhere: To be honest, I was never big into slathering Droid X with widgets. I did make use of most any widget, however, that notified me when something within the app was newly available. Google Reader and TweetDeck were my favorites in this regard. This had the very nice, practical effect that I could pull out my phone, glance at it, and stuff it back in my pocket knowing there was nothing worth looking at. With iOS, EVERYTHING requires you to go digging to see what's new. The most absurd instance of this is Reeder (which is all other respects is a great Google Reader replacement). It gives you the option to but an unread badge on the app icon (yay!) but then only checks for new items when you open the app (whatisthisidonteven...) This is also true of the notification bar, which I loved on Android but almost never use on iOS because, well, there's no way of knowing that it has anything in it till you pull it down. And, of course, there's no notification light. I always thought the Windows Phone 7 commercials were clever. Now I understand exactly what they're taunting.
• 4G: I knew that I would be giving up 4G going with the latest iPhone and it wasn't a big deal to me. It's still a bit of a disappointment, though, especially since I don't feel the tradeoff bought me much in terms of battery life (I get about the same battery life on my iPhone as I did on my Droid X)
• The Screen: I could gush all day about the quality of the retina display, but then I hold my iPhone next to my Droid X and sigh wistfully. It's not a huge problem, and the high DPI certainly helps, but 3.5" is really just a bit too cramped. I don't expect (or even want, really) a massive 4.6" beast or whatever is all the rage these days, but is 4" too much to ask?
• Mail: I was quite put out to realize that in it's infinite wisdom Apple has crippled it's Gmail interface. No push notifications. No contacts. You have to go through the clunky Exchange service just to get it working halfway decent, and then there's still weirdness such as "Delete" actually "Archiving". On top of that, I really hate how Apple handle's conversation threads. Google has just recently come out with an actual Gmail app for iOS, which gives me some hope, but it's still a pretty young app and is lacking some critical features, such as multiple profile support, which means I can't use it. sigh.
• Maps: There are many things that the iPhone does better than Android. Maps is not one of them. Android's built in maps offering completely blows away anything the iPhone offers, either built in or on the apps store. Frankly, it's embarrassing to see Apple touting things like "alternate route selection" in their new OS when Google's had it forever. And that route selection doesn't help me one bit because I have to stare at the screen while I'm driving just to use this sad excuse of "navigation." Voice navigation was one of the first things I missed when making the switch, because Google does it so very well. iOS does have a free MapQuest app that will do voice navigation passably, but otherwise it's a pretty horrid map application, and it makes me sad to have to have two separate map apps on my phone.
• Stupid app restrictions: I really don't care to use iBooks when I have a reasonably large pre-existing Kindle library, and it pisses me off that I have to go digging around in the browser to buy new books for it. On the same token, I loved Amazon's CloudPlayer on Android and it makes me sad to know that I'll never be able to use it on this device. These are things I was fully aware of going in, and not enough to sway my decision, but that doesn't stop it from being annoying.
• Syncing: I made the rather "stupid" mistake of plugging my phone into my work laptop to pull a couple of songs off right after I got it. Little did I know that this would form a bond between machines that was eternal and unyielding, to be broken only by the death and rebirth of my phone, like a Phoenix, through a process that shall henceforth be known as "nuking it from orbit."
  All jokes aside, it's patently absurd that you can only sync your phone with one machine. As long as I log in to iTunes with my Apple ID, can you give me one good reason why I shouldn't be able to use that instance of iTunes to manage my phone content? No. You cannot. It's funny, I've heard a lot of people complaining that Android devices show up as just a dumb USB drive when plugged into your PC. In my mind that's vastly preferable to this insanity.

Now that's a decent list of complaints, but honestly when you look at the whole package iOS comes out on top by a pretty wide margin. You have to be Richard Stallman-style fanatical about avoiding Apple's walled garden to actively let it deter you from the otherwise incredibly solid phone that they've created. I'm still going to be keeping a close eye on Android, and I think that eventually it CAN win out over Apple, but in the meantime I've been liking my iPhone very much, and have yet to regret the switch.

Building the Game: Part 4 - Static Model Instancing

See the code for this post, or all posts in this series.
See the live demo.

Today's post is going to be far less involved than the last one, but it's an important subject that we need to nail down the basics of before we move on too much further.

Thus far we've been doing a decent job of showing one thing on the screen at a time, which is great if the game you're building is "Crate in empty space" or "Look at this thing!", but that's not the game we want to build! We want to build games like "Holy crap! That's a lot of stuff on screen!" and "Look at all these things!"

...or something like that.

Building the Game: Part 3 - Skinning & Animation

See the code for this post, or all posts in this series.
See the live demo.

In the previous BtG we got the basics of a model format in place, but it only accounts for static meshes. Now, static geometry is very important and will make up the majority of any scene in our eventual game. But we all know that the most interesting things you see on screen are the ones that are moving, wether it be the player sprinting across the screen or the rocket careening towards your head.

There are many different techniques for creating motion in a game. It can be sliding a static mesh back and forth for a door, running a rigid body through a physics simulation, generating particle effects for smoke and sparks, transforming texture coordinates to fake flowing water, or deforming a mesh to look like waving cloth. We'll end up talking about some of those methods as we work our way through this series, but today I want to talk about the big daddy of animation: Skeletal Animation and Mesh Skinning!

Building the Game: Part 2 - Model Format

See the code for this post, or all posts in this series.
See the live demo.

So, after the previous BtG post we had a bare-bones pile of boilerplate code and nothing terribly interesting to show with it. Obviously it's impractical to hand-code all of our meshes into our game (although that would make it fast!), so the next order of business should be creating a way to get meshes out of the various different modeling tools and into our renderer in a format that's efficient and flexible.

In layman's terms, we need a model format!