[Bf-viewport] OpenGL ES compatibility

[Martijn Berger]

HI Yuri,

To be clear I suggested ANGLE mainly in the context of providing a better
default GL surface then the GDI drivers do on windows.
I think we should prefer to use a full OpenGL context if presented by the
driver when possible.

Practically I think having to use GLES 2.0 without at some of the
extensions: OES_framebuffer_object, OES_texture_half_float,
OES_texture_float, OES_vertex_array_object could maybe be limiting our
future goals to much. I am also not really clear which subset of this is
exposed on what ES 2.0 implementations.

And getting blender working on an *"OpenGL 2.1 core context"* ( 2.1 -
all features removed from the core context ) is a giant step in this
direction by itself.
And the current work in master cannot and will not bump us passed
OpenGL 2.1 anyway.




On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Yuri Kovelenov <yuri at blend4web.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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