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Half-Life 2 in a Browser

hl2.slqnt.dev

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Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#231

Post by kllrnohj »

Rohansi wrote: post #208
kllrnohj wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what purpose, though? Why saddle yourself with the overhead & restrictions of WASM and the limitations of WebGL (or even WebGPU), just to run in a browser? The typical answer for running in a browser is the fast deployment, but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway , then what's the point? Just to avoid needing an install wizard? And in case you aren't aware, 20GB would actually be a relatively sm…

> but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway, then what's the point? They don't have to unless the game makes them. Assets can be streamed in. This Half Life 2 port streams in each chapter so you are playing without having the entire game downloaded. World of Warcraft is over 100GB but you can start playing with only a fraction complete and it will continue downloading as you play

Half Life 2 is only ~4-6gb and was designed to run on video cards with 128-512mb of RAM, and it didn't even do texture streaming so you just need to have those assets at load time. Sure you can stream those low res textures at an acceptable rate. That's wholly different from streaming the textures for a modern game, which are at least an order of magnitude larger, and are expecting to stream in from NVME/SSD storage.

This website is also a proof of concept, it doesn't care if people are actually able to play it consistently. It can afford to just say "anyone with less than 100mbps internet gets a shitty experience, lol don't care" and nobody will complain, because it's a free tech demo. Not an actual product trying to sell copies and make money. And certainly not anything remotely modern, we are talking about an over 20 year old game here. Technology did, in fact, get a little bit faster and more capable over those last 20 years, you know

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#232

Post by thescriptkiddie »

lynguist wrote: post #118
gonzalohm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emul…

WOW64 is not emulation, it's just a second set of libraries exactly like the ia32-libs package on linux. OSX used to have this too but i guess apple got tired of maintaining it

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#233

Post by taintlord223 »

zamadatix wrote: post #205
paganartifact wrote: post #202

[dead]

It only loads the first 50 MB needed to start the game at first, as you interact/progress it loads more. 50 MB is definitely at the boundary of "how many users appreciate a button vs how many are ignored they have to click it to load the initial page" size. Having to click a button to see anything itself is even a scammy pattern as it's used by scam sites to get more permissions before the user has a chance to doubt…

[dead]

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#235

Post by Rohansi »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #214
Rohansi wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway, then what's the point? They don't have to unless the game makes them. Assets can be streamed in. This Half Life 2 port streams in each chapter so you are playing without having the entire game downloaded. World of Warcraft is over 100GB but you can start playing with only a fraction complete and it will continue downloading as you play

Performance of the game is much more important than download time Its really common to sacrifice disk space for runtime perf For gamers 100GB is not a big deal, CoD is like 200GB and its extremely popular

I disagree with your assertion that games running in a browser are not performant enough. WebAssembly being ~45% slower than native sounds scary, sure, but that's basically what you can expect from using any non-native language anyway. So if Unity is performant enough where all C# code has similar overhead then it should all be fine.

Plus not all games are AAA.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#236

Post by playorizaya »

zamadatix wrote: post #205
paganartifact wrote: post #202

[dead]

It only loads the first 50 MB needed to start the game at first, as you interact/progress it loads more. 50 MB is definitely at the boundary of "how many users appreciate a button vs how many are ignored they have to click it to load the initial page" size. Having to click a button to see anything itself is even a scammy pattern as it's used by scam sites to get more permissions before the user has a chance to doubt…

[flagged]

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#237

Post by __alexs »

zygentoma wrote: post #127
__alexs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only our legal institutions and the frameworks they create can decide if any specific act is a crime.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#238

Post by HelloUsername »

ionwake wrote: post #133
HelloUsername wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I personally love openra. It’s a smooth free online implementation of red alert 2 with multiplayer

> openra is an online implementation of red alert 2

Are you sure? As far as I know, OpenRA is a reimplementation of the first Red Alert game, and also it's not playable in the webbrowser (which is what this post is about)

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#239

Post by hecifato »

MrDOS wrote: post #171
ajross wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. It's literally a 2004 game! That's ridiculous. A handful of opterons existed in the market, but Intel wouldn't get there for years still and it was well over a decade until x86_64 crossed 50% market share in consumer stuff. Good grief, as it were.

In 2004, sure, but Valve didn't (publicly) ship Mac OS X software before 2010.

I hear what you're saying, but keep in mind that Bethesda shipped Skyrim as 32-bit in 2011. It wasn't until the Special Edition release in 2016 that it was updated to 64. Now, obviously, we could chalk that up to it just being Bethesda.

Re: Half-Life 2 in a Browser

#240

Post by hecifato »

dgb23 wrote: post #86
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.

Disheartening. macOS seems to get less and less support in a way. For example some of the Blizzard remakes don't run on macOS but the originals do.

I knew Blizzard was abandoning macOS when Overwatch didn't ship for it. I assume there must be a decent amount of Mac users playing WoW seeing as it still works on macOS and transitioned to ARM. Diablo 3 only ever got an ARM build because, apparently, Blizzard they replaced the 2010(?) Mac Pro that they were using to test Mac builds of the game with a Studio.
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