It was quite a pain - ArrayBuffers / Typed Arrays are fussy about byte alignment - but seems to be worth it.
Parsing times are down (modest gains for small objects / Firefox, bigger gains for large objects / Chrome, performance gains from 10% - 200%).
Also as a positive side effect, changing interleaved face arrays into uniform arrays seems to have helped a bit with gzip compression (about 6% smaller size for gzipped 526K Lucy).
Work-in-progress => do not merge yet.
OBJ converter, JSONLoader, BinaryLoader and some examples are done. Still need to do Blender exporter, SceneLoader and more examples.
Advantages:
- faster parse times
- bypass array initializer size limit in Firefox
- no more crashes in Chrome 15 (caused by too many concurrently active workers)
Disadvantages:
- more browser UI freezing
- multiple models tend to appear all at once with the last one (instead of popping up progressively)
Problem was having too many concurrent workers opened at once. Garbage collection apparently works very slowly on workers. Solution was to close them manually, after model data is sent to main thread.
Also some progress with Blender scene exporter. Some scenes now export correctly, though monkey test scene got worse, even with less hacky code.
Changed materials a bit to look better with lighter environment map.
Added space to buttons HTML so that Firefox don't draw them sticked together.
Also re-added htaccess for BIN files.
alteredq
Mr.doob