Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10(code.zynga.com) |
Zynga’s first foray into WebGL, and how it runs on IE10(code.zynga.com) |
Sorry for the language, but seriously, fuck these guys. What complete trolls. This is completely unacceptable. Software rasterization fallback has been a thing forever. Actually, you know, longer than OpenGL of any flavor. Cuz that used to be the only way you could do graphics.
Is there any way I can help to get this patent blocked? And how do we go about shaming young developers into not joining Zynga just because it's a "game" company? This isn't the first unethical thing they've done.
http://patents.stackexchange.com/
This site is exactly for this reason: raising patent questions with the goal of identifying bad patents.
"Ask Patents is a question and answer site for people interested in improving and participating in the US patent system. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to find Prior Art on dangerous and overly broad US Patent Applications before they become issued Patents. "
The USPTO does not and will not look at nor use an end-user forums like "Ask Patents" for the basis of any decision.
While there are a bunch of people working to make stuff performant on browsers, Zynga comes in from behind and starts patenting barely-novel stuff on top of it.
If the emscripten lot had decided to patent "Method to reconstruct flow structures from binary machine code" then Zynga would not have the privilege of porting their game to the web in the first place.
I lost a little more respect for Zynga today.
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/1769fbfc6c994b51a54c...
I also don't see any heuristic processing of shaders as described for ZyGL.
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/core/Face...
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/88092284cbe07723fe2b...
And the relevant issue: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/3663
So, what about that arbitrary shader code? In practice, the shaders used in 2D games tend to be fairly simple. ZyGL applies a series of heuristics to the shader code to try to infer its intent. It then uses these heuristics to map the draw calls through to some approximations of common shader code that we wrote in JavaScript.
I'm not aware of any prior art that is (a) a polyfill for WebGL using canvas that also (b) reconstructs triangle strips into canvas quads and (c) attempts to mimic shader effects by scanning the shader code for common techniques.
At first I was surprised, it looked like Zynga was doing something nice for a change. In the end, it seems all they're sharing is the bad news.
Zynga! Yes, I really am trying to patent the obvious, with loads of prior art.
Its opposite is "bazinga", which means "I was kidding".
Reconstructing quads from pairs of triangles is just about doable in a one-liner. The harder part in my opinion is applying texture mapping to the resulting triangle, but it's not unreasonably difficult.
// this depends on your winding
triangles = [1, 2, 4, 2, 3, 4]
quads = []
for i in xrange(len(triangles), 6):
t = triangles[i:i+6]
quads += [t[0], t[1], t[4], t[2]]
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/askpatents-com-a-stack...
The blog post is a puff piece for a new (at the time) StackExchange product and basically just talks about how they felt there was a need for something like this and how they felt the timing was good.
From the Stack Exchange blog post, "[USPTO director Kappos] came–twice!–to the Stack Exchange office in New York City to encourage us to open a Stack Exchange site that would generate heaps of prior art to help the patent examiners do their jobs."
Last year, then-acting USPTO director Rea said in a speech, "We consulted on a private-sector initiative called Ask Patents." http://www.uspto.gov/news/speeches/2013/rea_Managing_Ip.jsp Elsewhere they refer to a "partnership" with Ask Patents.
No, this doesn't mean that prior art submitted to Ask Patents is automatically read by the USPTO. But USPTO promotes it as a way to gather information which can then be submitted through their new public comment process.
Firstly, from the help page:
"Ask Patents blocks dangerous applications by alerting the US Patent Examiner of record when good Prior Art is found for an application that he or she is examining."
Secondly, the site contains examples of patents that were rejected with the site's help. You can search for questions with the [rejected] tag:
"The rejected tag is used on patent applications and patents which have been successfully narrowed or rejected by the USPTO after having been the subject of a prior-art-request on Ask Patents."
When we search for questions with this tag, we see text like "This Patent Application received a Final Rejection by the US Patent Office! The rejection was based in part on prior art found by Ask Patents community below!"