Marcus Kruger from Goo Technologies discusses why he and his company see WebGL and HTML5 as the future of gaming… in the cloud.

Khronos would like to thank Pragmatic for donating five OpenGL eBooks to the Khronos All-Day BOF Blitz™ and After-Party™. As well, Khronos would like to thank Vivante, the PC Gaming Alliance, Imagination Technologies and more others for their generous donations. Learn more about the upcoming Khronos BOF Blitz™ and After-Party™.

Need we say more?

Turbulenz developers are proud to announce that we have released the Turbulenz HTML5 game engine as open source under the standard MIT license. The open source project is available on GitHub.

Mozilla is investing in Firefox OS which explains why the company has been working on WebGL, in order to bring 3D graphics to the browser, Emscripten, a tool for compiling C++ applications into JavaScript, and asm.js, a high performance subset of JavaScript. Mozilla also announced at GDC that it has been working with Epic Games to port the Unreal 3 engine to the Web.

World Wide Maze is a pretty basic ball-rolling game, but at it’s core is something quite interesting. The first is a link to the mobile version of Chrome that turns your smartphone into a PC game controller. The second is of course that World Wide Maze works off the WebGL standard, and it requires pretty decent system specs for a browser game, including 1GB of RAM and a 256MB graphics card for hardware acceleration.

NME 3.5.5 has been released with WebGL support. NME is a framework for building games and applications for mobile, desktop and web platforms. OpenGLView was introduced in NME 3.5, and support for HTML5, using WebGL has now been added. The new “HerokuShaders” sample is a great cross-platform illustration of GLSL shaders at work. The sample will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BlackBerry and HTML5, and will run on other mobile platforms once GLES2 support is official.

The free WebGL 3D engine CopperLicht has just been released by Ambiera in version 1.6. CopperLicht now supports Particle Systems (a technique for rendering effects like fire, smoke, rain and snow), and includes improvements like 600% faster Billboard rendering. The 3D engine is now fully compatible to the also recently released WebGL editor CopperCube 4. The CopperLicht SDK can be downloaded and used freely.

With the release of Mozilla’s Firefox 15, comes a new demo ‘The BananaBread’, a 3D first-person shooter. This demo offers a compelling example of what developers can presently achieve with WebGL and compressed textures. The BananaBread engine is a JavaScript and WebGL port of the 3D game engine used in Cube 2: Sauerbraten. The initial port was accomplished by a Mozilla researcher using Emscripten, a sophisticated LLVM-based tool for transpiling conventional C/C++ code into JavaScript.

Valve Software has updated their Linux blog to report that the OpenGL version of Left 4 Dead 2 is now running fastest on Linux (315 fps). Surprisingly, given all the attention Valve has paid to Direct3D tuning over the years, even on Windows, the OpenGL version of the game now runs faster than Direct3D (304 fps vs. 270 fps) due to "overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows".

We are excited that Jon Peddie and Kathleen Maher both from Jon Peddie Research, will be traveling with us and will be in our booth to help us meet and greet the Chinese game development community. Additional details of this event will be posted on our official Khronos Group China Joy event page.

As Henrik points out in a video soundbyte, making amazing 3D graphics as easy to create as “view source” has got to be good for humanity, right?

We’re excited to announce the kick off of our Pokki 1UP $50k HTML5 game development challenge. The first place game developer will take home $30k and win a trip to the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco where we will feature their game! We’ve pulled together a top notch panel of game developer leaders to judge submissions which must be submitted by February 20th, 2012 at 11:59pm (PST). What’s also cool is that we just launched support for WebGL, WebSockets, and the Web Audio API. We’re really excited about cutting edge HTML5 technologies like canvas, CSS3, WebGL and Web Audio. There’s already been some impressive demos with these technologies and we’re looking forward to seeing what the Pokki game developers come up with.

AMD announced that the AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2012 (Fusion12) will be held on June 11-14, 2012 in Bellevue, Washington. The company’s annual developer summit will return to the Meydenbauer Center and the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue. The summit offers an engaging opportunity to learn more about next-generation software development and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) technology, central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) processor technologies, and programming methods using industry-standard application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenCL, OpenGL, Microsoft DirectCompute and C++ AMP.

ChuClone is a 2.5D HTML5 game that uses 2D physics (Box2D), but is drawn in 3D (Three.js). It contains a Box2D WorldEditor that can create/destroy/clone/drag/scale objects the world.
The editor supports panning, and zooming, levels are saved via HTML5 localstorage. You can fork the game at github.