Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#101

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #98

stcredzero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these benefits are tied to the crap browser platform that's been foisted on us. No, but they are tied to the web, for which browsers and JavaScript are an incumbent technology. You are right, in the same way that Windows has nothing in particular to do with games, outside of a fortunate adoption of DirectX. It's just that it's the way the world turned out. Admittedly, there are downsides.

The popularity of DirectX doesn't vindicate Windows either. So what's your point? It's shit but, eh, that's the way the world turned out? People have every right to be annoyed because the people who were entrusted with the concept of the web implemented it very badly. At least on Windows there's a serious effort to give me as much of the machine's power as possible. I had a better programming experience with Java app…

> At least on Windows there's a serious effort to give me as much of the machine's power as possible.

What is asm.js (and WebGL, for that matter) if not that?

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#102

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #82

azakai wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far superior in one major way - everyone has a web browser, and you can give them a link to run your game if it runs on the web. This avoids losing most of your users which is what happens if you ask them to install a plugin or a native app. Of course, on the other hand it is inferior in many ways. It's just another option for game creators (and other apps too). For some it will be useful, for others it will no…

Those are all hardware setups, whereas the browser is a very poorly designed portability layer (viewed in this way). It makes me physically angry how badly the browser vendors have dropped the ball here. It was obvious years ago that things were going this way, but instead of developing a proper application-development standard they just shoved everything into HTML. Every time I hear Mozilla talking about "innovation…

> The best that can be said is you have been good at marketing the whole thing by constantly pretending that it's "just Javascript" etc, when the end result is completely static (i.e. not Javascript).

asm.js executes according to the ECMA-262 semantics, which are the full dynamic semantics of JavaScript.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#103

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:42 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #48

All the asm.js stuff... well, they still haven't ported UE3/UT3 to Linux, haven't they? Sidenote: IIRC all UE code is cross-platform compatible - so shouldn't it be possible to fuse the UE3 JS engine port and the UT3 content to provide a "cross platform UT3"?

Why not use Firefox on Linux? That's a Linux port.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#104

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:49 AM UTC

catmanjan wrote: post #79

morsch wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 GB is about one or two hours at not-unusually-high speeds. You can probably start and run the game with much less assets. Having the assets available at multiple quality levels -- chances are that's the case already -- would shave off more time. And by the sound of it, 60% of your computer is still about as fast as the just-launched console generation. Not big issues, I think. The big issue is having a robust ecosy…

Except that was a typo, Titanfall actually has 50 GB of assets.

You can progressively download them while the user is playing. So you start for the menu/1st level content, then the user begins to play.

Meanwhile, all unused IO/network time loads the most likely next to be encountered content (so in most cases the next level). As this happens in the background, the user most likely will never notice the content has to be downloaded first.

Naturally, this leads to another problem: piracy. After all you don't want to create individually encrypted releases per player (doesn't scale for storage), and encryption on-the-fly is also not possible (doesn't scale neither on server nor on client side). So basically you just dump a shitload of data onto a CDN and hope nobody warez's it.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#105

Post by rjzzleep » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 12:57 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #100

Pacabel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can see, Mozilla is generally going in a direction that's alienating existing users, without necessarily bringing in any new ones. For example, it's widely understood today that Firefox has a much smaller share of the market now than it did a few years ago. Most measures I've seen show a drop from somewhere in the mid 30%'s down to under 20% today. Proportionally fewer Firefox users means less influence o…

> Asm.js is pretty unremarkable. It's a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript. NaCl is a much better approach that would ideally be adopted by the major browsers. Unfortunately, we've seen nothing but hostility toward it from Mozilla. Why is NaCl better? NaCl adds all of the complexity of LLVM to the Web platform, and is tied to Pepper, which is a Chrome-specific, nonstandard API. None of this is true for asm.js. > E…

> Why is NaCl better? NaCl adds all of the complexity of LLVM to the Web platform, and is tied to Pepper, which is a Chrome-specific, nonstandard API. None of this is true for asm.js.

i really really like mozilla. it's one of those few places, where i'd be comfortable working, but believe it or not, pacabel has raised a few very valid points.

nacl has much better performance and was a padded x86 abi, it's much easier to port some game to nacl, than it is to turn it into webgl. when i went to the google developer days in 2009 some of the google munich guys didn't like it either. i don't understand why. trying to force everything onto something as broken as javascript is odd.

but nacl is tied to pepper because npapi is utter shit. and has been for the past 10 years for that matter. i understand that you guys keep proposing npapi changes, because you want some sort of open thing, but it's broken. pacabel's point is valid, you had the power to push for an alternative, and you didn't. now that google has taken your spot, they took the opportunity to do that, and mozilla refuses to play along.

even though before nacl came out webkit already came out with webkit plugins, precisely because of the same problems ppapi is trying to address.

we know it's broken, apple knows it's broken, microsoft knows it's broken, and i'd be surprised if you didn't know it either. why beat around the bush?

i still love firefox and it's my main browser, and contrary to others i believe the memory usage is way below chrome. but on the other hand i'm forced to constantly run a chromium browser, because if i use flash in my favorite browser, the whole experience will eventually become so choppy that i have to close and open my browser.

then there's this shumway thing, which is a really cool piece of code, and i'd probably enjoy hacking and reversing(mainly because i like reversing), but let's face it realistically it's still completely irrelevant to the real world.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#106

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 1:03 AM UTC

rjzzleep wrote: post #105

pcwalton wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asm.js is pretty unremarkable. It's a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript. NaCl is a much better approach that would ideally be adopted by the major browsers. Unfortunately, we've seen nothing but hostility toward it from Mozilla. Why is NaCl better? NaCl adds all of the complexity of LLVM to the Web platform, and is tied to Pepper, which is a Chrome-specific, nonstandard API. None of this is true for asm.js. > E…

> Why is NaCl better? NaCl adds all of the complexity of LLVM to the Web platform, and is tied to Pepper, which is a Chrome-specific, nonstandard API. None of this is true for asm.js. i really really like mozilla. it's one of those few places, where i'd be comfortable working, but believe it or not, pacabel has raised a few very valid points. nacl has much better performance and was a padded x86 abi, it's much easier…

> but nacl is tied to pepper because npapi is utter shit. and has been for the past 10 years for that matter. i understand that you guys keep proposing npapi changes, because you want some sort of open thing, but it's broken. pacabel's point is valid, you had the power to push for an alternative, and you didn't. now that google has taken your spot, they took the opportunity to do that, and mozilla refuses to play along.

But asm.js is not tied to NPAPI!

In general it should be obvious that Mozilla isn't interested in plugins in general. Its solution to "NPAPI versus PPAPI" is "neither: use the Web APIs". This is what Robert O'Callahan was explicitly arguing on the plugin-futures mailing list several years ago.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#107

Post by azakai » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 1:08 AM UTC

taeric wrote: post #88

azakai wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web target is mainly of benefit in getting to users, not in designing the game. For design, you would use the engine's normal tools for all targets anyhow, web included.

As I said elsewhere, I only take this if you are saying "users" and meaning "developers." I can see the point, but I see access to the tools as way more valuable than this. And with the tools, I'm curious just how many more "users" developers will truly be able to aim for. One off demos not withstanding.

No, I meant users: You ship your game on the web, it reaches its users - the people playing it - directly. That's the benefit of the web.

I agree tools are important too, but the main benefit of the web is it is runs everywhere, and no one controls it.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#108

Post by stoptalkingshit » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 1:14 AM UTC

soapdog wrote: post #99

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clueless. Just clueless. None of these benefits are tied to the crap browser platform that's been foisted on us. The stewards of the browser did a terrible job of designing it, as proven by shoddy hacks like asm.js. Did you know that it took WebGL to get them to introduce typed arrays? They weren't smart enough to see the usefulness of this, they had to bumble into it. Same with async HTTP requests. So woopty-doo you…

WTF? You simply go around calling people clueless without knowing their background? What is wrong with you? The browser platform is not perfect, its not close to perfect, its evolving to do something that it was not originally designed to but it still the best shot at cross platform software. You can pick the JVM for all elegance it had, it never achieved what simple servers with bad markup languages did. There is a…

So what you're saying is it's lowest-common-denominator crap? Then we agree!

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#109

Post by stoptalkingshit » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 1:15 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #101

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The popularity of DirectX doesn't vindicate Windows either. So what's your point? It's shit but, eh, that's the way the world turned out? People have every right to be annoyed because the people who were entrusted with the concept of the web implemented it very badly. At least on Windows there's a serious effort to give me as much of the machine's power as possible. I had a better programming experience with Java app…

> At least on Windows there's a serious effort to give me as much of the machine's power as possible. What is asm.js (and WebGL, for that matter) if not that?

A decade-late attempt to catch up with the JVM. Notice how there's no design here? It's because the web people had no idea this would be necessary and it got bolted on as a reaction to competitors. That is to say, the innovation belongs to plugin vendors, not the web people.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#110

Post by johnbm » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 1:17 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #101

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The popularity of DirectX doesn't vindicate Windows either. So what's your point? It's shit but, eh, that's the way the world turned out? People have every right to be annoyed because the people who were entrusted with the concept of the web implemented it very badly. At least on Windows there's a serious effort to give me as much of the machine's power as possible. I had a better programming experience with Java app…

> At least on Windows there's a serious effort to give me as much of the machine's power as possible. What is asm.js (and WebGL, for that matter) if not that?

WebGL is a deliberately limited but secure sandbox based on a spec for mobile devices that is two major releases out of date and makes an Xbox 360 look like science fiction.

Asm.js is an enormous hack where we limit the computational expressiveness of performance critical code by the semantics and standard library of a language notoriously shit at it.