Cool! I recently ported Doom on browser so that you can easily play multi-player (up to 4) completely free (you can host it yourself on Cloudflare) https://playdoom.ossy.dev/
That is so wicked cool, I’m going to try this later today!!
Half-Life 2 in a Browser
211–220 of 283 posts
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#212few questions 1) how are games now showing up in browser? 2) how are they porting it, whats the process, can LLM do it? 3) how is it legal? how are they monetizing it ?
Art assets are the most controversial part about this, using the code is also controversial but can be obfuscated much easier than the art can
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#213With WASM and WebGL being mature technologies, I'm not sure why there aren't more video games published this way. For really big games with lots of assets, having those assets in local storage makes sense. But I wouldn't mind if a game "installer" is just your browser asking "This game wants to use up to 20 GB of local disc space. Is that okay?"
Tech people underestimate how much gamers care about performance
You see that a lot with all the game streaming platforms like Stadia
There's a whole mainstream culture of custom building PCs to maximize performance/value and YT channels focused on game perf like digital foundry are super popular
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what purpose, though? Why saddle yourself with the overhead & restrictions of WASM and the limitations of WebGL (or even WebGPU), just to run in a browser? The typical answer for running in a browser is the fast deployment, but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway , then what's the point? Just to avoid needing an install wizard? And in case you aren't aware, 20GB would actually be a relatively sm…
> but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway, then what's the point? They don't have to unless the game makes them. Assets can be streamed in. This Half Life 2 port streams in each chapter so you are playing without having the entire game downloaded. World of Warcraft is over 100GB but you can start playing with only a fraction complete and it will continue downloading as you play
Performance of the game is much more important than download time
Its really common to sacrifice disk space for runtime perf
For gamers 100GB is not a big deal, CoD is like 200GB and its extremely popular
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#215And Quake 3: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ And Unreal Tournament: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut There's also https://noclip.website/ which, while not playable, has hundreds of levels from dozens of older games that you can explore freely. Including Half-Life 2, with more accurate rendering than this web port (which seems to be missing many shaders including character eyes).
There's also Ultima Online in the browser (sanctioned by the official servers). I'm one of the maintainers. https://retail.classicuo.org/
It requires a paid account though, doesn't it?
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. It's literally a 2004 game! That's ridiculous. A handful of opterons existed in the market, but Intel wouldn't get there for years still and it was well over a decade until x86_64 crossed 50% market share in consumer stuff. Good grief, as it were.
In 2004, sure, but Valve didn't (publicly) ship Mac OS X software before 2010.
They didn't develop it from scratch though! The 2010 Mac HL2 binaries are a port of the existing 32 bit Windows product, with all the word size and alignment issues you'd expect for C++ code of that vintage. You don't magically wave a wand and expect high performance code to work when sizeof(void*) changes, and the effort to do that needs to be weighed against the perceived value and the size of the market.
Needless to say, annoying a bunch of HN nerds a quarter century in the future wasn't on Valve's radar. They just wanted some Mac revenue and picked the low hanging fruit.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#217And Quake 3: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ And Unreal Tournament: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut There's also https://noclip.website/ which, while not playable, has hundreds of levels from dozens of older games that you can explore freely. Including Half-Life 2, with more accurate rendering than this web port (which seems to be missing many shaders including character eyes).
noclip website is so dang cool, petition for them to add music. I'd cry if I could hear those ragnarok map songs while exploring.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#218Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#219few questions 1) how are games now showing up in browser? 2) how are they porting it, whats the process, can LLM do it? 3) how is it legal? how are they monetizing it ?
1) They were in browsers since 2000s. Then Steve Jobs held a grudge with Adobe and Flash took a major blow. Today, we successfuly reinvented the wheel using "open" technologies - on the client side at least, the authoring tools of Flash are still uncomparable.
2) WebAssembly, compiling the leaked HL2 code. The graphics stack is WebGL.
3) Absolutely illegal, it exists until a cease&desist comes from Valve. We may see it taken down even today. They aren't.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#220And Quake 3: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ And Unreal Tournament: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut There's also https://noclip.website/ which, while not playable, has hundreds of levels from dozens of older games that you can explore freely. Including Half-Life 2, with more accurate rendering than this web port (which seems to be missing many shaders including character eyes).
Also xonotic! https://www.xonotic.gg/