Can BIMSurfer offer 2 versions, one is for WEBGL2 and another is for WEBGL1?

[huangsn10]

Since most of the current Web Browsers do not support the webGL2 so that it is unable to see 3D scene in mobile phone by BIMSurferV3, so can the BIM SurferV3.0 add one options of selecting between WebGL1 and WebGL2? It means that there will be 2 versions of BIMSurferV3, one is for GL1 and another is for GL2. Is it possible ? how difficult about that?

[rubendel]

Most of the current Web Browsers actually DO support WebGL2, Safari is the only one not supporting it.

I would estimate the development effort to be about 120 hours. You would end up with a viewer with probably a few features missing and pretty bad performance (relative to the WebGL2 version).

[akuckartz]

@huangsn10 Maybe you can ask Apple Inc. to finance such a development - or to allow modern browsers on iOS devices ;-)

[aothms]

WebGL 2 offers function calls to selectively read and overwrite buffers stored in GPU memory. Without this the kind of interactivity in a viewer like this would be much harder to implement (and may require additional copies of the data to be accessible by JS (webgl1 gpu buffers are not) or fetch data again from the server when modifications in state need to occur. Assuming you have access to the OES_element_index_uint extension (very common on desktop webgl implementations) I don't think performance necessarily needs to be a lot worse.

[huangsn10]

@rubendel OK thanks alot and I will continue to follow this issue, I am looking forward to see the viewer and I think it will be welcome to most of the user