Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Half-Life 2 in a Browser

hl2.slqnt.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 283 posts

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#141

Post by nickpeterson »

hwc wrote: 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?"

I’ve always wondered a bit about the ssr side of these things a bit. Something like time crisis where the main video is pre-rendered and streamed but the interactive elements (enemies, explosions) are superimposed in front on the client. Feels like you could make a very low bandwidth experience (around the same cost as a YouTube video plus some assets?).

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#142

Post by freedomben »

rvnx wrote: post #81
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a time to be alive

What a time, but at what cost ? Interestingly, these Wasm ports are all about nostalgia games. I sort-of wish we would live in 1998 (when HL1 was released). Less social network, a more creative internet, LAN parties, IRC / ICQ, easier new connections. We now have tailwind / material UI, a locked-down Apple ecosystem, Photoshop with millions of nagging screens, centralized mega-corps like OpenAI, and the first bits of…

Happy Monday everybody!

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#143

Post by freedomben »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #135
rvnx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a time, but at what cost ? Interestingly, these Wasm ports are all about nostalgia games. I sort-of wish we would live in 1998 (when HL1 was released). Less social network, a more creative internet, LAN parties, IRC / ICQ, easier new connections. We now have tailwind / material UI, a locked-down Apple ecosystem, Photoshop with millions of nagging screens, centralized mega-corps like OpenAI, and the first bits of…

It is so easy to not use tailwind, apple, photoshop, or openai. It's really easy to stay off of social networks. Computers are smaller/easier to move so lan parties are easier (although as a real adult with a real job they're harder to pull off). The world war 3 bits suck, i'll admit, but most of the "early internet" stuff that people are nostalgic about still exists, you just have to look for it.

> you just have to look for it.

Any tips for finding these things like communities? Seems like most communities are private now unless you know people in meat space. Living in a rural area, those opportunities are far and few between for me.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#145

Post by baal80spam »

account42 wrote: post #85
alt227 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about people who are in different parts of the world and don't inherently understand your meaning? That is terrible behaviour to downvote the notation. Text is notorious for not conveying context. Sarcasm can easily be seen as serious by some people, why is why we have the /s notation to make it obvious. People aren't idiots, they come from different backgrounds, locations, languages, and all use English as…

The best sarcasm is exactly the one where it could be interpreted as written and people misreading it is part of the fun. If you are going to add sarcasm marks to make sure that absolutely everyone gets what you are intending then whats the point of using sarcasm in the first place instead of clearly writing what you mean?

> The best sarcasm is exactly the one where it could be interpreted as written and people misreading it is part of the fun.

Is it kind of a reverse Poe's Law?

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#146

Post by navane »

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).

GTA vice city https://quenq.com/apps/vice-city/

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#148

Post by belinder »

OptionOfT wrote: post #126
HelloUsername wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On first look it looks like interpolated frames

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#149

Post by utopiah »

account42 wrote: post #71
utopiah wrote: 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…

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.

Tricky to block WASM. A lot of useful Websites use for genuinely good usage. Can be for syntax highlighting, chess engine, etc and the same goes for WebGL or WebGPU, they are used for responsive UI in dashboard, for data visualization, for video rendering with effects e.g. blurring a background behind a person thus privacy, etc. Blocking either of those would break a lot of modern useful Websites.
Post reply on HN