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Half-Life 2 in a Browser

hl2.slqnt.dev

221–230 of 283 posts

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#221
post #9

And 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).

And Duke Nukem 3D made by my friend Gawen: https://gawen.me/webduke

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#222
post #131

With 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?"

Technical reasons I know of: - Support from major engines is still bad: Unreal Engine does not have web exports. Godot 4 does not support them when using C#. That only leaves Unity. - While WebGL is mature, it's based on openGL es3, which is an ancient api/shading language with limited features. If you were previously targeting vulkan/dx12, now you have to restrict your feature set or find (costly) workarounds to mak…

Unreal Engine 5 does support the web, albeit as a third party implementation (my company)

We spent the last several years building out a WebGPU RHI for UE5, along with tooling to make games load fast using asset streaming, while using less memory. We were recently featured by Gamesbeat.

You can read more about it below or check out our website:

https://gamesbeat.com/simplystream-unlocks-web-compatibility...

https://simplystream.com/

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#223
post #9

And 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).

That was fun thank you, haven't played quake 3 in awhile, so many memory neurons firing!

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#224
post #131

With 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?"

The fact the site died after being posted here might be an indication why :-P.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#225

How is it that this came to my Apple-Silicon Mac before Valve could do it natively? How could it possibly be easier to create a complete-enough virtual machine that runs in a browser and the compiler for it than it is to port the native application? I wish we could spend as much time on native application development as we do on horribly crippled and slow browser application development. Web technology is so non-sens…

That's a somewhat reaching use of the word "natively".

It's being run through the equivalent of a virtual machine. So it's really quite similar to the layers used to abstract away platform specifics like Wine / Proton does for Windows compatibility. Instead of DXVK you have WebGL.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#226
post #56

That's also the kind of Website, beside the impressive technical result, that reminds me nothing can be blocked. It's not about bypassing VPN or deep pack inspection, rather it's about how once anything, including a very complex video game (like here) to an entire OS with a host machine (like QEMU on WASM, or a random InternetArchive link about emulation) is "just" a Web page that can be hosted... on anything (includ…

I made the old MMO EverQuest but in a browser, complete with a custom server built from the ground up. It's in a bit of a state of transition right now and sorta buggy, but:

https://www.idlequest.net/

It shares the neat feature of the HL2 project in that it doesn't need any installation, and it downloads zone files (which aren't huge) as needed. It can also run around and kill/loot things automatically for you!

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple goes way out of their way every few years to ensure old games stop working

The don’t let backwards compatibility stop them from doing anything, but I don’t think they go out of their way to target games. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

All 32-bit support got dropped, so you're totally right. It might appear to target games because games are disproportionately likely to not get updated to new archs and to be run long after they were introduced. Nobody is going back to run some 32-bit-only RSS reader or text editor from 2007 even though there surely were some.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#228

How is it that this came to my Apple-Silicon Mac before Valve could do it natively? How could it possibly be easier to create a complete-enough virtual machine that runs in a browser and the compiler for it than it is to port the native application? I wish we could spend as much time on native application development as we do on horribly crippled and slow browser application development. Web technology is so non-sens…

That's a somewhat reaching use of the word "natively". It's being run through the equivalent of a virtual machine. So it's really quite similar to the layers used to abstract away platform specifics like Wine / Proton does for Windows compatibility. Instead of DXVK you have WebGL.

So this port isn't a straight WASM port, you're saying they're running the Windows binary and translating the DirectX8 graphic commands over to WebGL..? Am I understanding correctly?

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#229
post #9

And 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/

come on man i got work to do

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#230
post #9

And 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).

Everyone posting links made me want to find HL1 in browser: https://x8bitrain.github.io/webXash/
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