Hello WebGL source code

With SmartMS v1.0.1 out you can now use WebGL!

Download HelloWebGL.zip (51 kB), it contains the first demo (in .opp form and pre-compiled), as well as the initial WebGLScene units which you’ll have to copy to your “Libraries” folder (the WebGL import units should have been delivered in v1.0.1).

  • GLS.Vectors: contains vector manipulations types as well as a collection of helpers to operate on them.
  • GLS.Base: contains Pascal classes to simplify basic OpenGL tasks revolving around buffers and shaders.

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FireMonkey’s TCube & Tessellation

a cubeIf any of you had a look at FireMonkey’s TCube object, you might have noticed rendering it is quite slow and quite complex.

If you were curious enough to look at the code, you might have noticed that TCube is actually a static mesh made up of 452 vertices, 1440 indices and 480 triangles, instead of the 8 vertices and 6 quads (12 triangles) one could have expected.

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A look at the 3D side of FireMonkey

This post was actually written sometime ago, alas XE2 Update 1 didn’t change much.

I’ve been looking at FireMonkey 3D side, by that I mean strictly the 3D side, not the UI components, or the 2D. Here are some observations, most born from maintaining and developing 3D software in C++ and later with GLScene, and with an eye to eventually porting some of GLScene code to FireMonkey (after all, most of GLScene’s code is actually linear algebra stuff, mesh manipulations, file format imports, etc. and not OpenGL-specific).

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glInfo for Android

Just published glInfo in the Android Market, this is a simple utility that provides information on the OpenGL ES driver of the device it’s running on (version, supported extensions, limits…) and allows to copy or mail the whole report.

Its purpose is to facilitate gathering device OpenGL ES support information, when the device you’re targeting or have issues with is in the hands of a non-developer… or in the hands of a lazy developer 😉

It is named after from the glInfo utility that used to be hosted at Tom Nuydens’s Delphi3d site.