Spector.js VS webgl-rock-pillars

Author of the WebGL volume rendering tutorial [0] you mentioned in the readme here, great work!

Working in WebGL/JS is nice since you can deploy it everywhere, but it can be really hard for graphics programming as you've found because there are very few tools for doing real GPU/graphics debugging for WebGL. The only one I know of is [1], and I've had limited success with it.

WebGPU is a great next step, it provides a modern GPU API (so if you want to learn Metal, DX12, Vulkan, they're more familiar), and modern GPU functionality like storage buffers and compute shaders, not to mention lower overhead and better performance. The WebGPU inspector [2] also looks to provide a GPU profiler/debugger for web that aims to be on par with native options. I just tried it out on a small project I have and it looks really useful. Another benefit of WebGPU is that it maps more clearly to Metal/DX12/Vulkan, so you can use native tools to profile it through Chrome [3].

I think it would be worth learning C++ and a native graphics API, you'll get access to the much more powerful graphics debugging & profiling features provided by native tools (PIX, RenderDoc, Nvidia Nsight, Xcode, etc.) and functionality beyond what even WebGPU exposes.

Personally, I have come "full circle": I started with C++ and OpenGL, then DX12/Vulkan/Metal, then started doing more WebGL/WebGPU and JS/TS to "run everywhere", and now I'm back writing C++ but using WebGL/WebGPU and compiling to WebAssembly to still everywhere (and native for tools).

With WebGPU, you could program in C++ (or Rust) and compile to both native (for access to debuggers and tools), and Wasm (for wide deployment on the web). This is one of the aspects of WebGPU that is most exciting to me. There's a great tutorial on developing WebGPU w/ C++ [4], and a one on using it from JS/TS [5].

[0] https://www.willusher.io/webgl/2019/01/13/volume-rendering-w...

[1] https://spector.babylonjs.com/

[2] https://github.com/brendan-duncan/webgpu_inspector

[3] https://toji.dev/webgpu-profiling/pix

[4] https://eliemichel.github.io/LearnWebGPU/

[5] https://webgpufundamentals.org/

For debugging, spector.js helps sometimes.

If you want to know what the browser supports, webglreport.com will tell you. If you want to know what a specific page is using, https://spector.babylonjs.com/ can probably tell you. Alternatively, you can go into dev tools, select the canvas in the inspector, and run $0.getContext('webgl2') to see if it's webgl2 or not.

I'm actually not sure. Here is the implementation. The extension can capture single frames of WebGL animations, I think it's something to do with getting the timing of that frame (finding its start and end).

Article explaining rendering+generation of scene: https://medium.com/@keaukraine/floating-islands-webgl-demo-3bba99a004ee Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/keaukraine/webgl-rock-pillars

To make an impression of an endless random scene there were 2 options: a true random scene and a looped generated path. The first option requires object placement on the fly in front of the camera which means these positions have to be transferred to GPU dynamically. So a better option is to generate a static looped path once and draw objects along it as the camera moves. You can find a function to generate a base spline in the positionOnSpline function in ObjectPlacement.ts file. It creates a circular looped path for the camera with oscillating radius. A couple of harmonics are applied to randomize the circle radius so it appears random but is still perfectly looped. Then, all objects are placed around this path - trees are under the camera, rocks above and to the sides.