Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Apple may have burned a lot of developer bridges with Metal, deprecating OpenGL, and ignoring Vulkan.
To be fair Microsoft ignored Vulkan with Windows leaving it up to 3P to implement.
How is that "fair"?
Half-Life 2 in a Browser
111–120 of 283 posts
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#112Interesting, I am not able to play HL2 on Steam because macOS no longer has 32-bit support and Valve never compiled if for 64-bit but here we are, it’s playable on the same OS in the browser. BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
How is that possible? 32 bits should be compatible with a 64 bit machine. You can always use less bits for your memory addresses. Are there any other architecture changes that are preventing 32 bits binaries from running? Does that also mean that old software no longer runs unless there is a 64 bit version? In windows you can run x32 and x64 executables in a 64 bits machine
Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2. Apple is guilty of many sins, but this isn't one of them. Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. The binary was already obsolete before it even left Bellevue.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Apple may have burned a lot of developer bridges with Metal, deprecating OpenGL, and ignoring Vulkan.
To be fair Microsoft ignored Vulkan with Windows leaving it up to 3P to implement.
I don't think Valve funded Proton and Linux development by accident.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#114That'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…
Sounds like companies should start locking down browsers to disable WebGL, WASM and other similar APIs targeted at apps as opposed to web pages. I would welcome this if it got web developers to stop using more than they actually need.
You’re thinking of Facebook, and you can still get that.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#115I remember saving up for a year to buy the ATI Radeon 9600 XT (I think it was $200 MSRP) so I could play the game on high settings. Now we can play it inside a virtual machine on a crappy laptop. What a journey
I was just going to say the same thing. I couldn't afford the rigs needed to run any of these games and never really played them. Now, it's running inside a browser on a laptop.
…while inside Jira working on a ticket.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair Microsoft ignored Vulkan with Windows leaving it up to 3P to implement.
How is that "fair"?
they're not saying it's fair to consumers, they're saying "it's not just apple, microsoft does it too", i.e. that judgement on apple should be made in the context of how its competitors behaved
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#117And 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).
Doom 3, smoother on Macbook M1 but it's too dark that I need to actually increase brightness on Firefox reliably. Is there a better solutions?
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#118Interesting, I am not able to play HL2 on Steam because macOS no longer has 32-bit support and Valve never compiled if for 64-bit but here we are, it’s playable on the same OS in the browser. BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
How is that possible? 32 bits should be compatible with a 64 bit machine. You can always use less bits for your memory addresses. Are there any other architecture changes that are preventing 32 bits binaries from running? Does that also mean that old software no longer runs unless there is a 64 bit version? In windows you can run x32 and x64 executables in a 64 bits machine
Monsieur, on Windows this problem was solved with a large development effort, that's why it goes unnoticed on you. Note that CPU level instruction emulation is literally the easiest problem of emulation. (Why do you think you can't just go and execute Nintendo Switch binaries on your Mac M1? Both run ARM64.)
On Windows, this was is implemented as SysWOW64. WOW64 means Windows on Windows 64. It makes the userland emulation and pretends towards the process that everything around him (incl. drivers) are the 32-bit ones.
Source: Microsoft.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081222-00/?p=19...
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#119How 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-sensical to me. "you can run an application without installing it!" Well, friend, installation is not required either, and we can deliver applications on demand, and we've done it before. "You just visit a page and you can program the macros on your keyboard!" Again, it's not like those applications are large; they could be delivered on demand if we wanted.
But we don't want that, do we? We want people to remain online under any circumstance, we desparately want their time, so we require that people be online if they want to program their microcontroller and they don't know how to do it without visiting the very convenient webpage.
If people spent 10% of the effort on native applications that they spent on web applications, we would be so much further advanced than we are now. If you're a developer, targeting the web is so seductive, so easy in comparison, that we all have to be online to do anything, now. We all have to run two dozen Electron apps because developers want to have an easy time at the expense of every user.
Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser
#120I remember saving up for a year to buy the ATI Radeon 9600 XT (I think it was $200 MSRP) so I could play the game on high settings. Now we can play it inside a virtual machine on a crappy laptop. What a journey
In a few years todays high end AI models will run on your watch Of course that assumes we maintain open access to compute that we've enjoyed for the last half century, and I doubt that very much. Stallman warned about the dangers of software being closed [0] 30 years ago, and the majority of modern IT industry just laugh a that sort of stuff because you can't make a billion dollar startup with that attitude, but I th…
> In a few years todays high end AI models will run on your watch
Although possible with cpu power, I dont think you will ever get enough ram in a watch to run a decent local LLM.
I also dont think the high ram requirements for running them will come down at all.