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

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

#131

Post by epsylon » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 9:49 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #59

taeric wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ignored my 200% mark, though. If I could run this demo in the browser and it pegs all of my cpus, compared to running the same demo "native" and having half my system capable of idling, I'm not sure I see the win. Even if it gets to 100% of "native." (I hate that it sounds like I am claiming that is the case here, as I really don't know.)

> I'm not sure I see the win For a user that can install a native build, the native build will run better. No doubt. But, most users in the world do not know how to install apps, and even if they did they shouldn't because of security concerns. For that reason, game devs know that asking people to install a plugin or a native build will kill off most of the potential users of their game. Instead, if you just give peo…

> But, most users in the world do not know how to install apps

That's a ridiculous claim.

> if they did they shouldn't because of security concerns.

Equally ridiculous. All the new shiny HTML5 tech is also bringing its load of security issues and an ever-increasing attack surface as the Web Browser slowly transforms itself into an OS.

There's a valid reason for running small games into the browser, but there'll never be a good reason to do that for a performance demanding game.

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

#132

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 9:56 AM UTC

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #109

pcwalton wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would have been perfectly happy to be working with the JVM here, except that the JVM as a platform for web-type client stuff died because the user experience was implemented so shoddily.

There was no conspiracy against it. It had its chance. It used to have high install rates. It was placed about as perfectly for success as you could hope to be. If it hadn't failed so miserably at what it set out to do and be (and instead succeeded in a different area), we would be using it now, and living in the utopia you wish for.

As an aside, a lot of your complaints against web technologies make it sound as if there is a cohesive group of people designing something and doing it wrong. Actually it's a much more chaotic process involving a diverse group of people and companies and competing interests. It doesn't guarantee that we end up with the best designs, but such a process has benefits too, and since it's happening in the open, you could actually take part too (assuming you aren't already).

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

#133

Post by stoptalkingshit » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 10:32 AM UTC

kybernetikos wrote: post #132

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would have been perfectly happy to be working with the JVM here, except that the JVM as a platform for web-type client stuff died because the user experience was implemented so shoddily. There was no conspiracy against it. It had its chance. It used to have high install rates. It was placed about as perfectly for success as you could hope to be. If it hadn't failed so miserably at what it set out to do and be (and…

>It doesn't guarantee that we end up with the best designs, but such a process has benefits too, and since it's happening in the open, you could actually take part too (assuming you aren't already).

Unfortunately, what is needed is LESS people participating.

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

#134

Post by agapos » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 11:06 AM UTC

nnethercote wrote: post #116

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…

Oh look! Pacabel's written down his/her "Mozilla is crap" laundry-list post again. It's getting a bit tired, Pacabel.

Let's just say that pushing Directory Tiles so fast* that the end-users do not even have a chance to react is not a good way for Mozilla to prove it's worthiness. Also, it doesn't matter if groups within Mozilla keep making chemically pure awesomeness (like your Shrink team or the JS guys), if the leadership has to do only one thing to overshadow the good things with bad news.

* arrangement bugs are already worked on the way I saw it

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

#135

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:17 PM UTC

soapdog wrote: post #87

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…

Firefox OS has been launched in 16 countries. You may not be on an emerging market but people on most of these countries are enjoying what affordable smartphones can give them. In Venezuela alone Firefox OS already has a larger marketshare than Windows Phone. Firefox OS went from 0 to 16 countries, 4 hardware manufacturers and 4 global telecoms in 2 years. And it did that while being open, accepting contribution, enc…

> Four years ago no one could believe that a whole OS could be built on top of a web engine.

I think most people do remember WebOS.

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

#136

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:20 PM UTC

soapdog wrote: post #90

argh people here are so negative. You get a lot of the content you consume over the web. You can stream videos over the web and that is more convenient that using DVDs. you get "facts" from wikipedia and similar resources and thats easier than picking dead tree encyclopedia. This is about convenience. When games start being playable on browsers you won't need a local install or different ports for different platforms…

You can do all of that with TCP/IP or any other network stack, no need for HTTP.

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

#137

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 8:31 PM UTC

johnbm wrote: post #129

pcwalton wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unreal Engine 4 is a counterexample. > 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. How is it limited?

"Unreal Engine 4" is marketing buzzspeak. WebGL is modelled after OpenGL ES 2. Its GLSL support is massively outdated. It lacks features like multiple render targets (used by any deferred renderer in the XB360 era, e.g. Unreal Engine 3), geometry shaders, multisampled reads (for HDR MSAA and hybrid spatial/temporal AA techniques), and tons of other common techniques. Asm.js is limited by having no 32-bit float type,…

> "Unreal Engine 4" is marketing buzzspeak. WebGL is modelled after OpenGL ES 2. Its GLSL support is massively outdated. It lacks features like multiple render targets (used by any deferred renderer in the XB360 era, e.g. Unreal Engine 3), geometry shaders, multisampled reads (for HDR MSAA and hybrid spatial/temporal AA techniques), and tons of other common techniques.

WebGL 2.0 has many of the extensions and is in Editor's Draft status: http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/latest/2.0/ It has a prototype implementation already: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebGL2

> Asm.js is limited by having no 32-bit float type, no 64-bit int type, no SIMD, no dynamic memory allocation and the fact that they had to extend the language from day 1 just to be able to multiply a 32-bit integer by another quickly.

asm.js has 32-bit floats already: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/gap-between-asm-js-and-nat...

64-bit ints and SIMD are being discussed on TC39 right now. Dynamic memory allocation (assuming you mean growing the typed array) isn't that important and we have ways to do it if we need to.

> You may want to actually inform yourself.

This kind of comment is emblematic of HN's evaporative cooling, especially when it's inaccurate. :(

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

#138

Post by Pacabel » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 10:10 PM UTC

soapdog wrote: post #87

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…

Firefox OS has been launched in 16 countries. You may not be on an emerging market but people on most of these countries are enjoying what affordable smartphones can give them. In Venezuela alone Firefox OS already has a larger marketshare than Windows Phone. Firefox OS went from 0 to 16 countries, 4 hardware manufacturers and 4 global telecoms in 2 years. And it did that while being open, accepting contribution, enc…

Those arguments aren't very convincing.

Launching in just 16 out of 190+ countries isn't very impressive. That's well under 10% of the entire world.

Likewise, having more market share than the 4th or 5th place competitor, but still being significantly far behind the leaders, isn't very impressive either. It's even less impressive when this is in a rather small and irrelevant market.

And the web argument isn't very good, either, given that Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, and the other major players support the same technology.

All I see here is Mozilla spending a lot of time and effort on a product that's seeing very little adoption, while only being able to do a fraction of what its competitors are able to do.

That's just not a way to gain influence, and it's not a way to maintain whatever influence they still have thanks to their success with Firefox in the distant past.

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

#139

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Mar 14, 2014, 2:07 AM UTC

stoptalkingshit wrote: post #128

stcredzero wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shit but, eh, that's the way the world turned out? We are in agreement. People have every right to be annoyed because the people who were entrusted with the concept of the web implemented it very badly. Again, no disagreement. But in the meantime, implementing things is still my preferred activity to complaining.

Well, I agree. And asm.js etc are better than what we had before, so some praise should be allocated to them. But it is not innovative or elegant; it's a hack that takes us back to the state of the JVM more than a decade ago, and we're going to be paying the cost for it for some time. Hell, they can't even get the simplest possible thing - the syntax of HTML - right. So it will always anger me when I see web types to…

They are good at one thing: marketing to stupids.

Windows. The market has spoken. Let's just all be smart enough to not be defeated by the marketing to stupids.

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

#140

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Mar 14, 2014, 2:30 AM UTC

taeric wrote: post #114

stcredzero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web does not have any better discoverability than any store front that proceeded it. You're kidding, right? (Maybe not old enough to remember the world pre-Google?)

I'm not kidding. I am definitely old enough to remember the world pre google. I am also old enough that my kids can discover a crapton of stuff walking the isles of walmart. Even now, I am more likely to discover a good game walking down the wall of gamespot than I am surfing the web. If I really want some discoverability, I go for magazines or similar digital fare nowdays. Seriously, when was the last time you used…

Seriously, when was the last time you used google to find a game.

Seriously, Google's the first place I turn to to find anything but a game.

It is not like there were no methods to get games created and distributed pre google.

But it did and does seriously help people find almost everything. As far as discoverability of games, I'm not sure what the problem is. I think the sad truth is that most games that aren't the big hits and aren't beloved long tail cult classics just suck. That said, it's kind of hard to make sure your long tail cult classic gets traction in an app store, unless you have the help of an outside community, which is usually helped tremendously by the web and by search engines like Google. (Just as BBS helped back in those days.)