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".
