Half-Life 2 in a Browser • Hacker News Board

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#121

Post by tapoxi » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

roflcopter69 wrote: post #88

LandenLove wrote: post #7

As much as I dislike webdev stuff, I love the way you can distribute entire programs through WASM. Super cool stuff! For those who are interested, I recommend checking out Godot for exporting games on the web. It's really easy to do and you can host it on Itch.io

Isn't Godot kinda flawed for deploying to the web? For example, no C# as of now, although there have been plenty of efforts to make it work. Or AFAIU audio being forced to stay in the main thread which can cause glitches. I just mean that it's not all fun and games as soon as you want to make a more ambitious game and not just a quick demo or game jam thingy.

Godot 3.x supports C# on the web because it uses Mono.

Godot 4.x migrated to CoreCLR since Mono is a dead end, but Microsoft insists on .NET being the entrypoint in a WASM build. MS initially promised support for .NET being invoked by something else but dropped the feature, leaving Godot stranded. The current proposal is to make Godot a library (libgodot) invoked by .NET.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#122

Post by HelloUsername » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:08 PM UTC

modeless wrote: 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 Red Alert 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#123

Post by denkmoon » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:12 PM UTC

Input doesn’t work so well on my iPad (lol) but seeing that intro rendered in safari on said ipad, wild. So cool

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#124

Post by postatic » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

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/

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#125

Post by Jolter » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

todotask2 wrote: post #117

modeless wrote: 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).

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? https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/

I seem to recall that Doom 3 was unplayable dark on my PC, once upon a time.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#126

Post by OptionOfT » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:35 PM UTC

HelloUsername wrote: post #122

modeless wrote: 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 Red Alert 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853

I have tried that one and it truly baffles me. If you play it you'll notice the movement of the ships is extremely smooth, vs the original where ships only rotated in increments of 45 degrees.

I wonder how they did this.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#127

Post by zygentoma » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:35 PM UTC

__alexs wrote: post #93

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A crime is a crime even before a judge rules over it. Sure, innocent until proven guilty, but most people know when they're doing something wrong and then don't do it. Of course, this is a lot more grey area for copyright violations etc because it's a civil matter.

What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

"Innocent until proven guilty" concerns whether someone did a crime, not whether something is a crime.

An action can clearly be a crime, but it might be unclear if you did that action.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#128

Post by iberator » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:38 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #37

Interesting, 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.

wine?

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#129

Post by jessinra98 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

I loaded this up on my old Intel MacBook half-expecting it to crash instantly, and it actually ran through the train station at a solid clip before falling over in the canals. Anyone know how the shader work compares to the actual Source engine?

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#130

Post by philipwhiuk » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #37

Interesting, 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.

MacOS removing 32bit support was a massive pain. A bunch of Ambrosia Software games no longer work too (e.g. Escape Velocity Nova, Apeiron).