Half-Life 2 in a Browser • Hacker News Board

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#181

Post by helo- » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:22 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/

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Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#182

Post by csecskolbasz » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#183

Post by csecskolbasz » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#184

Post by dmitshur » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #18

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 Tomb Raider https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu Fan remake of the levels to avoid asset copy, but it's a downstream of the original engine (and loads the original level files just fine), so the real game.

Also a TR1-4 level and cutscene viewer at https://popov72.github.io/TRN2/.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#185

Post by taylor-tg » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #130

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).

I know it's not a remake, but Endless Sky[0] seems to be a pretty faithful "reimagining" of the EV series. Even has an Android port on F-Droid. I haven't played through much of it, but the first few minutes gave me immediate nostalgia.

[0] https://endless-sky.github.io/

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#186

Post by robhlt » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #98

shakna wrote: post #90

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.

Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#187

Post by mclau153 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

I wish there were more github deployments of these, when people make these custom websites they are more likely to be blocked

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#188

Post by Retr0id » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #176

Retr0id wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of hl2 the source code for the engine has leaked, so you can recompile it for your target platform of choice, no "conversion" needed. I got it running natively on aarch64 linux a while back, with no issues.

So why can’t Valve do it?

Not a priority I guess.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#189

Post by dandersch » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

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?"

Technical reasons I know of:

- Support from major engines is still bad: Unreal Engine does not have web exports. Godot 4 does not support them when using C#. That only leaves Unity.

- While WebGL is mature, it's based on openGL es3, which is an ancient api/shading language with limited features. If you were previously targeting vulkan/dx12, now you have to restrict your feature set or find (costly) workarounds to make webgl support happen

- WebGPU could be a better fit, but support is still not ubiquitous (Firefox, Linux or older phones are especially bad)

- SDL_GPU (SDL3) still has no WebGPU backend

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#190

Post by zamadatix » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #8

rvz wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Yup. I was going to finally buy half life 2 today but now I’ve seen this I guess I won’t need to. Hard times at Valve, I suppose they’ll have to find more children to start gambling with them.

I don't think they wrote the comment because of the impact to Valve. After all, they said legal rather than ethical and the page already seems to be gone (hopefully just a temporary hosting thing due to popularity rather than a takedown thing, but it will soon become the latter regardless).

If you want these kinds of things to stay up long enough for many people to see/use them you have to work around the legal limitations (regardless of whether they make ethical sense). Most commonly, make the site apply as a diff to the original content/assets the user provides.