We had an awesome Ruby|Web conference at Snowbird ski resort outside Salt Lake City last week. I was able to share some of my thoughts on WebGL and also connect it with ruby event machine.

I have slides available and I also replicated the content on my github account.

I know now that the websockets demo did not work because I needed to launch the site from either my on-disk copy or through a web server running on localhost. It was a cross-domain scripting issue that caused it to simply print that “I should probably reconnect to the server” when trying to connect. One thing that I would have mentioned in the talk is if you have a server helping two people play a game, the collision detection has to be done on the server. It’s done in the client now but if we continued along that way, you would have inconsistent results when one client thought there was a miss and the other thought it was a hit.

I’ll have video when confreaks puts it online. Unfortunately I didn’t have the demo running in full speed. There are framework issues with processingjs and my laptop’s 3d accelerator. On top of that, I couldn’t borrow another machine because there is a bug in snow leopard that breaks OpenGL shading and makes the game run fast but look terrible. Hopefully Apple fixes this soon.

Also, interesting, I think the conference scraping sites saw “coming soon” in my talk title and passed over it, as if the session was not ready yet. So avoid things like that or TBA if you want to get indexed properly.

The location for this one was awesome. It’s starting to get a chill in the air up at that elevation and it was a nice escape from the heat around the city. I also headed out on a trail for a few minutes after the conference ended. Let’s get a bunch of people and do a hike together next year. See you there.