At FITC Toronto this year, Dustin Malik and I presented a session for developers interested in WebGL — where it is today and where WebGL is headed. I made a promise to open source my WebGL sample (previously known as Webscape) and I’m happy to say that it’s available today!

Two months prior to FITC, I had very little personal experience with WebGL development. I spent two weeks researching WebGL technologies and frameworks with the ultimate goal being to pack as many topics that a typical WebGL game dev might come across into one sample.

Over the next week, I tried various WebGL frameworks. I managed to make quite a bit of progress using Three.js before I hit my first issue and realized that without knowing how WebGL works under the hood, I’d have a difficult time resolving my own issues. Imagine trying to debug a public framework like jQuery without having knowledge of JavaScript®.

So I started over, this time using pure WebGL as my approach and www.learningwebgl.com as my primary resource of information. The next three weeks saw the majority of my coding. I wanted to take the project as far as I could before the FITC conference.

In that time, I managed to implement forms of terrain generation and pathing, ambient and directional lighting, a skybox, virtual controls, and texture blending. It was an adventure, to say the least. I left a week for debugging and touch-ups, and then it was conference time.

Primarily, this sample is intended to be a learning resource. As such, it has been open sourced at our WebGL-Samples Github repository. Feel free to take it, rip it apart, and build up something grander. This sample is not perfect, but it does take a lot of concepts and brings them into one place. Feedback, questions, and contributions are all welcome. If you have your own projects you’re working on, I’d be ecstatic to see them!

Finally, I wanted to say thank you to the following people whose contributions to the online community helped me greatly along my way: Learning WebGL, Brandon Jones, Jerome Etienne, Chandler Prall, Andrea Giammarch, Paul Irish and Erik Möller, Ricardo Cabello, and the Valve Developer Community.