WebGL Texture Utils and Building Require.js libs

Two things to go over today:

One, I've got a new library out. WebGL Texture Utils. It's, as you might imagine, a collection of utilities to assist with loading WebGL textures of several different forms. Actually the repo for it has been available for a little bit now, but it's only today that I feel things have actually gotten to the point where it's really useful.

If I built a physics engine...

So let's be clear about something right from the very start: I'm not a physics guy. I love me a good physics engine, but I will likely never build one because that's just not where my expertise lies. Far be it from me to criticize the algorithms used by your broadphase collision pass, because I only have the most high level of ideas what that actually is. I'm a graphics guy through and through and that's where I'm happy to stay.

However, I do know a thing or two about writing fast Javascript code, which is something that will become fairly important to the new breed of browser-oriented physics engines that are starting to crop up, like Ammo.js, Cannon.js, and the various Box2D ports. Unfortunately, however, I've seen a few common threads within these engines that I think will limit their effectiveness in real-world use, and I wanted to get some of it off my chest while the development of these libraries is still in the early days. Some of these trends are inherited from the underlying C++ libs these libraries wrap (like Ammo.js, which is built from Bullet with Emscripten), but others appear to be self imposed. That's the group I'm talking to.