On 06/06/2016 01:36 PM, scott wrote:
>> Sometimes I really wish I knew how to do this stuff for myself...
>
> Follow a tutorial on WebGL - or if you want to skip all the html/js
> boilerplate stuff you'll need to know, go straight to something like
> shadertoy. There are plenty of examples, and shadertoy now supports
> reading back pixels from previous frames, so you can do
> multi-frame-averaging for path-tracing amongst other effects.
>
> Building a lens simulator (with real-time path-traced results) sounds
> feasible and very interesting.

Well, I went to the ShaderToy website... and discovered that apparently 
Opera has WebGL support that's flaky as *hell*! The number of times I 
have to close and reopen the browser to turn WebGL back on...

Some of the shaders on offer are absurd. I saw one that was a real-time 
simulation of waves crashing on a giant sea... fractal wave 
distribution, subsurface scattering, specular highlights... and wondered 
why the hell they don't put this in games yet!

But mostly, attempting to browse the shaders just broke Opera.

After about an hour of squinting at the sparse ShaderToy documentation 
and making some educated guesses, I did eventually manage to build a 
trivial ray-tracer that runs in real-time. I have no idea how to do 
random number generation yet, but we'll see...

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