PhiloGL 1.2.0 released

I’m very excited to announce that PhiloGL version 1.2.0 has been released!

This release adds a lot of goodies to the Framework, like a much better design for multiple program management, a better design for picking enabling us to have finer grain picking, a brand new Quat class for quaternions and a couple of new primitives and improvements in O3D. All this with some updated documentation and a new demo!

Multiple program management

We always had the possibility to create multiple programs and use them in a PhiloGL application (see lesson 13), but in a more object-oriented model of applications we might want to assign programs to objects themselves than manually managing programs here and there.

You can define multiple programs right in the main PhiloGL constructor function as an array of program configurations with a specified id:

PhiloGL({
  program: [{
    id: 'program1',
    from: 'uris',
    vs: './vertex1.vs.glsl',
    fs: './fragment1.fs.glsl'
  }, {
    id: 'program2',
    from: 'uris',
    vs: './vertex2.vs.glsl',
    fs: './fragment2.fs.glsl'
  }]
  //other options here...
});

Then you can set a program id to any model you like by instanciating a model with:

var myObject = new O3D.Model({
  program: 'program1'
  //other options here...
});

and then each model will have a program assigned and used before being rendered. Easy!

Finer grain picking

The picking algorithm used in PhiloGL is a color picking algorithm. Each model is assigned a different color and the scene is rendered to a texture. Then, the pixel pointed by the mouse position is retrieved from the texture and the color of that pixel is used to identify the model.

Sometimes we want to know more than just which object has been picked. For example, we might want to know which face of that object has been picked. In that case the [O3D]((http://senchalabs.github.com/philogl/doc/o3d.html) constructor options pickingColors and pick are useful. By defining your own set of per vertex colors and a method that given a pixel returns special information on what part of the object has been retrieved, then it is possible to have finer grain picking. For more information about how to use this you can take a look at the World Flights example or go to the Google group of the framework.

More stuff

A [Quat]((http://senchalabs.github.com/philogl/doc/math.html#Quat) class has been added and also other interesting options in O3D.Model constructors have been included, like an attributes object to define buffers and attributes per model.

World Flights

World Flights is a data visualization powered by PhiloGL that displays the routes of all major airlines in the globe. Red markers indicate cities served by airports, and blue curves show the routes each airline makes and their destinations. You can drag and drop the globe, and also select new airlines from the controls on the right. The link to the application is here.

WebGL camp #3 at Google HQ

Last but not least, I’ll be making a presentation on PhiloGL at WebGL camp this Friday. Regirstration is still open, so I hope to see you there!