Show HN: A CSS 3D Engine (no WebGL) (github.com)
21 points by rofko 3 hours ago
tomaytotomato 30 minutes ago
Always thought it would be cool to make an RTS or simple city builder game in the browser.
Would you recommend this for hacking around or not?
thih9 9 minutes ago
It’s a wide range from an RTS to a city builder. Perhaps try it for a couple of hours and see whether you like it or not.
Rohansi 2 hours ago
But why not use WebGL? It's widely available, more efficient, and can render at a much higher quality.
rofko an hour ago
Hi there! This is not trying to be a three.js replacement, scenes with huge polygon counts naturally should render in canvas.
For me, the interesting case is smaller low-poly or voxel scenes where loading a full 3D stack may be overkill, and where keeping the scene in DOM/CSS gives you easier integration with normal layout, styling, events, etc. Once you have the HTML, you don't even need to load the library to render a static model.
Also, part of the experiment is testing the browser’s limits and getting a clearer sense of where this approach works, where it breaks down, and what the tradeoffs are.
Cheers!
woodrowbarlow 10 minutes ago
ha, so you could run this on the server and send down a page with no javascript at all? (with, i assume, a static camera only.) that's fun. i mean, you could also just render the model to an image at that point, but still, this is neat.
socalgal2 an hour ago
Same thought. Even that simple Apple on the front pages runs < 60fps on my M1 Mac. Rendering 3D objects with CSS is like rendering Doom in Excel Cells. Yes, you can do it. No you should not do it except as a joke/curiosity.
cush 2 hours ago
I give it 15 minutes before someone on here ports Doom
bryanrasmussen an hour ago
sgm1018 an hour ago
wow thats cool