parasti/parabola

Render Neverball environments in the browser

Parabola

Parabola is a WebGL rewrite of the Neverball renderer in plain old Javascript. See the demo.

Neverball is a tilt-and-roll action game. Check it out.

Parabola is incomplete, but fun to play with.

Parabola uses instanced arrays and vertex array objects to speed up rendering. A scene graph is used to compute modelview matrices. Neverball-style lighting is partially implemented as a vertex shader.

Missing stuff

• Ball shadow (blob shadow)
• Mirrors (world mirror on XZ plane)
• ...

Opportunities

Not in any specific order:

• Non-moving level geometry (bodies that are not attached to a path) could be merged into a single static mesh. That might significantly reduce the number of modelview matrices that need to be computed and uploaded.
• Texture atlas support. Wouldn't it be cool if loading a SOL would download just a single additional image instead of N images where N is the number of materials.
• Sorting batches by distance to camera. A moving camera makes this complicated, but it doesn't have to be instant: a limited number of distance vallues could be computed per frame.

Background

"Parabola" started out as an April Fools joke on the Neverball forum where I "forked" Neverball. The name is a play on the very real Nuncabola, a reimplementation of Neverball in Java.

Perhaps most famously, Parabola was secretly used to create neverball-poop.gif which I also posted on the Neverball forum:

Usage

npm install
npm start
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