[Bf-viewport] OpenGL ES compatibility

[Yuri Kovelenov]

Hi Brecht, Mike,

Yes, the situation around graphics capabilities is getting better! A few 
years ago we observed at best 1-2 FPS on tablets
but now we can run our heaviest "desktop-only" demos on recent iPad Pro.
Still there are computers in our office with Win XP and/or old video 
cards which cannot even initialize WebGL context.
I remember myself starting my graphics career with a cheap notebook 
(video card of which I could not upgrade, because it's a laptop :D).
This is great that Blender is so forgiving in regards to system 
requirements - 3DS Max for example can only work on 64-bit Windows 7+.

Using ANGLE as backend for Blender viewport looks very promising to me. 
You will only write OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0 code - it will be
automatically translated to DX 9, 11 and desktop GL. Why not use a 
robust, open source solution provided by Google folks?
You guys will be able to concentrate on features rather than dealing 
with multiple user complaints like "Simply cannot run Blender, help!!!!11"

https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle/+/master/README.md

As for Blend4Web, it would be much easier for us to improve consistency 
between the viewport and WebGL rendering. Now, our users suffer from
a single huge issue - they want to see the same result while authoring 
their scenes in Blender as on a web page. We'll be also able to contribute
our optimized ES 2.0 code for many real-time features (post FX, shadows, 
new GLSL nodes, etc) to Blender.

We also believe that Blender can and should work on tablets and even in 
browsers. It is even more important for the BGE - currently,
game developers are forced to switch to proprietary solutions such as 
Unity simply because the BGE does not support mobile devices.
If Blender was based on OpenGL ES, the JavaScript build could be 
obtained almost automatically by using the Emscripten compiler.

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Porting-Examples-and-Demos

I hope this will help!

Best regards,

Yuri

Blend4Web Team
https://www.blend4web.com