In-browser 3D engines --suggestions?

General Discussions
#1

Hi,

We’re considering releasing a 3D game-like application in a few months that is to run within a browser window, and we’d like some recommendations for 3D engines to use.
Our users are primarily on broadband, so download size isn’t a big concern (within reason, > 20MB would be too much). What is a concern is dealing with the plethora of
graphics cards and system configurations.

We’ve looked at JOGL but we’re not sure what the level of OpenGL support is out there. Java3D can also run on top of DirectX but can it run in a browser window?
Is Java3D still supported? (Sun activity seems to be primarily on JOGL…) WildTangent seems to run on top of DirectX, but it looks like they haven’t had an
API release in 3-4 yrs, which worries me. We’d like to have a software-rendering fallback, in case the user has an ancient graphics card, but we haven’t
seen much in terms of software-rendering engines.

So, do you guys have any recommendations? Any engines we’ve missed? Anything we shouldn’t be worrying about? Anything we SHOULD be worrying about and
haven’t?

Thanks for any pointers,
S.

#2

It depends on how much you want to do by hand and how much you want the engine to take care of. I am developing an application at work that runs in a browser using LWJGL but has a Java2D fallback. This implementation requres that everything is done by hand so we are building out own engine as we go along. We figure that this will let us swap out bindings and rendering technology if need be without much trouble! If you decide to go this route I could give you some pointers that’ll save you some time! ;D

#3

You may have a look at jPCT (http://www.jpct.net), which can do software rendering as well as hardware rendering via LWJGL/OpenGL. It will work in an unsigned applet (example: http://www.tokima.com/2005a) and it should be possible to use the hardware rendering in signed applets when using Java 1.4 or higher (poc: http://www.jpct.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=258) but i’m not sure how reliable that is. Software rendering will work even in a 1.1 compatible VM as long as your own code doesn’t require a higher version.