Investigate rendering alternatives

[jjant]

Description

Rendering is currently implemented using Glium. I picked this library initially because it was the only one I was familiar with.

My main concerns with it are that it looks like WASM is not supported (which we do want), and that compile times may be excessively long for what we need (we only need a handful of OpenGL functions).

Possible alternatives

• glow: https://github.com/grovesNL/glow

• pixels: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels
  It looks like WebGL/wasm support is WIP but it might be ready for the things we need

• Raw calls to OpenGL (look into https://crates.io/crates/gl_generator)

[lesleyrs]

I have to mention here that changing crates could introduce some problems for old intel graphics cards.

Not sure what exactly causes it but it's a known issue in Godot engine where people using GLES3 and 3d without lights with intel hd 620 causes screen to flash rapidly. And it's a very common old card.

And more relevant is that Macroquad using it's own graphics library has the same damn issue. It isn't even related to 3d or lighting in this case, I know this because I happen to have a laptop with intel hd 620. Literally just having a non black background or a few other colors already causes the flashing which makes it completely unusable. However building to wasm or changing screen dimensions circumvents this problem?

It's not the fault of the graphics libraries, it may be possible for Macroquad to make it work in these edge cases but I've never looked that deep into it. I just think this is important to mention because using this project is very fitting for low end devices.

Here's a link if you like flashing lights in your face: not-fl3/macroquad#520

TLDR: OpenGL drivers are broken on old cards and never got fixed, they mostly work though. For me the intel hd 620 on the current setup works but that could stop working if you add different OpenGL features I think. I believe if you use Vulkan it's supposed to always work on anything that supports it, which is almost everything these days.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try an alternative, but it's important to be aware of this. I'd be willing to test it out if you do change crates. Not sure how glow compares to glium but pixels uses wgpu so it supports things other than OpenGL which is good. I don't know what part about OpenGL causes the flashing so don't take this too literally do what you want.

Also I see your recent commit mentions wasm, so is it supported?

[jjant]

This is a pretty stale issue, I stopped using glium in #28 in favour of glow for wasm support. pixels or wgpu are interesting alternatives to try, but I'm not sure if it's currently worth it to spend time on that, glow seems to work well enough, and the compile times are okay (and tbh I doubt they'll be better with the other crates) which is the main thing I was concerned about IIRC.

[lesleyrs]

Oh ok, in that case glow seems to work well on this bad driver. I've not had any issues so pixels doesn't seem needed, you could close this.

Edit: @jjant I know you said we should use serve, but what is causing the wasm build to fail on github pages? I ran the bash file then moved files to root. https://github.com/lesleyrs/runty8/tree/wasm-test

[jjant]

I only mentioned serve because it's an easy to set up local server but it shouldn't matter what you using for serving those file.

I think yours might have failed because you had too many files in the deployment? I've configured GH pages to use the /docs directory in this branch, moving the generated files from the build script and it deployed successfully here.

[jjant]

Btw, it's a cool idea to have some games deployed on push to master. Ideally I would like to not need to have these files commited in the repo (i.e, have a GH action run the build_script and deploy those files).

I'll make a separate issue for this.

Edit: See #56.

[jjant]

Closed as stale/not worth diving into right now.

[lesleyrs]

I only mentioned serve because it's an easy to set up local server but it shouldn't matter what you using for serving those file.

I think yours might have failed because you had too many files in the deployment? I've configured GH pages to use the /docs directory in this branch, moving the generated files from the build script and it deployed successfully here.

You're right after putting the files in a directory it started working, I haven't had that problem before.

Also your github pages is pointing to a custom domain that isn't loading: https://github.com/jjant/runty8/deployments