Open nicknack23 opened 3 years ago
Hey, Thanks very much for the feedback! No worries for opening an issue, if no-one has asked these questions before, this is the perfect place for others to find them!
Thanks for the quick and comprehensive response! I'm really interested in seeing your thoughts about the future of OGL so I hope you can find some time to throw a quick Roadmap section into the Readme. I think once you wrap things up and release version 1.0, all it would take is a few announcements on Hacker News, HTML5gamedevs, relevant subreddits, etc to immediately attract a lot more users to OGL.
I can understand not wanting to clutter up your code with jsdocs annotations, but there are cleaner approaches that are still pretty easy. Since you already use Github Pages to host your examples, you could have Docsify generate an adjacent documentation section from Markdown, see tutorial. You could begin with just cross-referencing commands with links to examples that illustrate them, that would still be useful.
Yes please, can you add more examples? I'm particularly interested on how to play an GLTF animation
Hi @gordonnl,
First, thank you for a great library!
I think that a good documentation section could be great. I would be willing to help out if you want.
I agree with you that most of the stuff is documented in the various examples, but I personally used a bit of time getting both Texture and Orbit working, and understanding the various options.
Thanks for your feedback @tkjaergaard - digging a little further, how did you finally figure out how to use those features? I would assume that the Textures and Orbit Controls examples would contain most of the necessary information, but I have a feeling that tracking down the appropriate/relevant example is not obvious, or perhaps those examples are missing some more vital info.
Yes please, can you add more examples? I'm particularly interested on how to play an GLTF animation
@schmidtsonian If you drag and drop a gltf/glb file onto the Load-GLTF example, it will play the first animation it finds. I agree that a dedicated example would be great, however for now you can hopefully still get an idea for how it works.
These are the main lines related, within the frame loop function:
Thanks for your feedback @tkjaergaard - digging a little further, how did you finally figure out how to use those features? I would assume that the Textures and Orbit Controls examples would contain most of the necessary information, but I have a feeling that tracking down the appropriate/relevant example is not obvious, or perhaps those examples are missing some more vital info.
Yeah, for the texture I for some reason ended up looking at this example. But I was unsure about the target option. Then I found the example you’re referencing and it worked.
The Orbit was particularly tricky to get working.
I ended up finding the forcePosition
method here, which solved the issue for me (I just got a blank screen).
Ah I see, thanks for the details!
I know you don't need it now, but as an explanation to anyone with the same Texture confusion - for the target
property on Textures, it maps directly to the native WebGL method bindTexture
's first argument. As OGL sets gl.TEXTURE_2D
by default, you can basically forget about it unless you are dealing with cube maps.
For Orbit, it sounds like perhaps your camera position was set at (0, 0, 0), however it's just a guess. In cases where you are trying to manipulate it beyond the default use-case, I totally agree with you that it's not obvious (nor possible in some cases without editing the class). I have some ideas for re-writing this class in order to make it more open for a variety of input options (e.g manual camera animations).
@gordonnl Yeah, that makes sense! But this is the reason why I suggest a simple documentation, stating the different options for the individual classes 😊
Something like the Vue or React documentation could be a reference point for simplicity? Maybe combined with existing and new examples that are referenced in the relevant sections?
For documentation, you mention a 'simple documentation stating the different class options' - for that, I would love the source code to be digestible enough to explore - especially in the kind of cases you mentioned where a dev either forgets the name of an argument, what it does, what the default is etc. There are only 8 classes in the OGL core after-all, most of which are fairly small.
OGL is by-design a very thin abstraction from WebGL, so I don't really like the idea of people only referring to it as a black-box, even if that is largely acceptable.
For the Vue/React style documentation, I find those more of a 'tutorial' or 'how-to-guide' series of articles rather than your regular API, JS-DOC-style documentation - and for this I find the examples are a great compromise for doing the bare minimum coverage. I'm totally not against there existing a step-by-step guide through all of the things you can do with the OGL library along with detailed instructions and caveats, however it's very time consuming to create.
If you have any other points/features of OGL that you or others find confusing, it would be great to note them down and share, so we can either add some comments in the relevant class, or add an example shedding light to that area!
I agree with you that it's a light abstraction of WebGl and it's very pleasent to use! For the documentation part, i offered initiality to help, if wanted.
But this also kind of boils down to, @nicknack23 initial question on, what the goals are for OGL?
I get the feeling that you kind of just want to keep it on a low. Mostly covering your personal needs, rather than be an alternative to something like Three.js? Which is totally cool, i'm just seeing more potential here.
For me it's light, intuitive to work with and feels modern in it's structure. But i'm sad to hear the hostility towards something like TS, Documentation etc. which make me think if you even want OGL to be something that is more widely used?
I personally am ok with a lack of public roadmap, but would really love to see atleast lighting incorporated as an in-built feature. I believe it should still keep OGL low on abstraction.
Also, if someone could please add in the greyed out examples. Thanks
I just stumbled across this little library today while looking for a more lightweight replacement for the Pixi.js WebGL interface I'm currently using. OGL seems amazing and I'm surprised I hadn't heard about it before. I have some simple questions - sorry for opening an issue just to ask them (see forum question below)!
Looking forward to diving into OGL!