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App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

rogueengine.io

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Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#331

Post by felbane »

Intermernet wrote: post #304
nox101 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need UDP? I see lots of multiplayer browser games. Here's a few https://browsergames.gg/ Google shows me a bunch of RPGs https://www.google.com/search?q=browser+based+rpg FPSes here https://poki.com/en/shooting or maybe better a video showing some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ad5jcXPbNw I know none of them are Edlin Ring, Skyrim, or Call of Duty. One issue with Web games is users's expect them to start qui…

I know it was a typo, but I want to play edlin ring. The most frustrating text mode adventure ever.

And its sequel, Vimborne.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#332

Post by dredmorbius »

pacifika wrote: post #56

The app can be installed only by tapping, but the web app requires typing in the url or into a search. I feel this is difficult for many more people with less motor skills, or that can’t read.

Save bookmark to home screen.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#333

Post by prmph »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #250
ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #248

There's a clear agenda with this article. I'm all for website wrapping apps being websites again. But I'm definitely sick of websites that should be apps. And I'd use a native app any day over a bloated website masquerading as an app, especially on desktop.

Hard agree on all that. And to be honest, none of these things solve the actual issue which is tons of these apps are software that is built by companies who do not build good software, and no framework or methodology is going to overcome that fact. My banking app, Chase, is terrific. It is either native or such a well optimized web wrapped one that I can't tell the difference, which would be a first-of-kind. It has…

Kind of off-topic, but I always wonder why Chase bank's tech is so good. I seldom use the app, preferring instead to use the website, but no matter which way I interact with Chase, they seems to know what they are doing.

This is all the more surprising considering how other other banks, let alone other large companies, seem to blunder all the time with their services, especially online banking.

I returned to my country Ghana from the US a few years back, and more time passes, the more I realize just how valuable my account with them is. Never have I felt I needed to visit a physical branch for anything. Everything just works. In my view, they are arguably the best bank in the world.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#334

Post by antifa »

jampekka wrote: post #25
noam_compsci wrote: post #17

Web gaming might be a decent incremental revenue source ( But it will never be more than that. 1. Game ops is too entrenched in mobile. The entire stack (user acquisition, analytics, monetisation) is tried and tested on mobile. These are difficult problems that seem easy to port to web games, but “devils in the detail”. Eg When you’re waiting on appsflyer to ship an update to properly attribute reinstalls for 6 month…

I'm sure there are problems with web games, but some of your arguments seem stem from ignorance about the modern web tech[1]. > 2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab. Fullscreen mode mostly solves the misclick problem. PWAs solve it entirely. Do co…

I'm not sure about the specifics of UE/Unity/Godot but I was under the impression that a Hello World in any of those for the web would be about 20MB where as the Three.js game I'm working on will be at most 1MB when done (not counting game music soundtrack).

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#335

Post by mckravchyk »

rubymamis wrote: post #329
mckravchyk wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if it's worth it though. As you have pointed out, QML is buggy. Chromium's rendering engine is probably the most stable and polished GUI toolkit there is, not to mention a cross-platform one too. Throughout the last 10 years I only had to deal with 2 Chromium bugs and they were very minor. Well-written JavaScript is fast and the machines are getting faster every year. It does not take much real time com…

Hi there! Indeed, QML is very buggy. But there's also a large discrepancy between Chromium's budget (Google) and The Qt Company. Also The Qt Company tend to prioritize advancement in the embedded world (where it probably gets most of its cash) rather than regular applications. So, many bugs get fixed through open-source contributors (KDE, individuals, etc) And that might be a big reason why non-critical bugs don't ge…

> But there's also a large discrepancy between Chromium's budget (Google) and The Qt Company. Also The Qt Company tend to prioritize advancement in the embedded world (where it probably gets most of its cash) rather than regular applications

Yep. That's precisely the point, you get all this stuff from a billion dollar project for free.

I really would not mind writing some C++ instead, even if it was more difficult. If anything, it would only be better because of higher moat of the project as well as my own skills. I agree 100% on the principles that native is better, faster and JS is an unnecessary layer of abstraction slowing things down.

However, if I can compare 2 timelines, one where I am using QML for a project, another one where I am using Electron and think about the time spent working around bugs, reporting bugs and the users of the app complain about crashes in the former, or not have any of that at the trade off of having something slightly slower, to me it's a no brainer.

In the context of what you wrote in the article:

> One of the most frustrating aspects of developing a Qt application is the slew of Qt bugs you encounter along the way. During ten months of development, I reported seven bugs, three of which were assigned 'critical' priority—two of which resulted in crashes. I also came across many bugs already reported by others that remain unfixed.

I would rather have an app that is slightly slower than one that can crash unexpectedly. Even if they are quick to fix bugs, new bugs may be introduced in new releases. Your intent was to promote QT in your blog post, but unfortunately it has only affirmed to me that it's not something production-ready (QML on desktop).

That's just the unfortunate state of industry where we are at. Hopefully it changes one day. Maybe Chromium could be forked into a C++ GUI toolkit where DOM could be manipulated directly by C++. Has anyone ever considered that?

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#336

Post by 6510 »

Anechoic wrote: post #182
tshaddox wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You've been able to add websites to the home screen going back at least to the iPhone 5 in 2012. Is it the "PWA" part you're questioning? iOS definitely does have PWA support, although with a few notable limitations that may be deal-breakers for certain apps. Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU.

Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU Apple reversed that decision back in March [0] (expand "Why don't users in the EU have access to Home Screen web apps?") [0] https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu

It is really quite complicated to do. Since you get some interesting functionality I had considered it but writing the page how to add the website to the home screen I couldn't imagine users doing this.

My least favorite dark pattern is that you first have to change the share menu and add the option. That way it seems less inconvenient to people who've done it before.

To share a fun perspective: Desktop desktops and phone home screens are really revolutionary compared to the browser bookmark menus and app stores are really web directories that are both glamorous and horrible at the same time.

There is sabotage along the way but we are clearly moving forwards.

Imagine an AI starting a thread or a sub forum for each application it can find online. Then have it gather articles about the application and post them as replies or topics. Divide everything neatly over categories (like a web directory) and have it gather usable icons/logos for navigation. By default it only displays software for the users platform or browser but a few check boxes in advanced search settings can change the selection.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#337

Post by Y_Y »

dotancohen wrote: post #326
Y_Y wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel your pain, though I blame the websites more than the browsers. I can run full firefox on my OG pinephone as long as the sites I visit aren't running a pile of JS lunacy. My Onyx Boox runs Firefox happily too, but for that and the pinephone I'd recommend trying out a Gemini browser (there are several on fdroid). It's lacking plenty, but has an old-web feel, no sites are slow, and you can handily use it on old d…

> I feel your pain, though I blame the websites more than the browsers. I blame the standards organizations. I love the Boox devices as well. My Note Air 2 Plus is almost two years old, it is a terrific machine. I'd love to know what your use cases are. I mostly use it for taking notes and reading - including on the web - but I'm rather unhappy with most browsers on it including Firefox. For one thing, Firefox on And…

Oh yes, I think the web standards orgs are culpable (especially W3C) for not making it fast and simple to implement the features PHBs demand. This is surely in spite of the good people working on their behalf, and more a sad molochian consequence of regulatory capture big big adtech.

My Boox Color 7 was originally bought for terminal work and I connect it to my bluetooth keyboard and use tailscale and termux to make it a nice e-ink "dumb terminal". It's also nice for reading books on, and downloading said books (though I miss Kindle's email transfer method). I did try watching a YouTube video on it once, the result was almost watchable and far better than expected.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#338

Post by jampekka »

antifa wrote: post #334
jampekka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there are problems with web games, but some of your arguments seem stem from ignorance about the modern web tech[1]. > 2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab. Fullscreen mode mostly solves the misclick problem. PWAs solve it entirely. Do co…

I'm not sure about the specifics of UE/Unity/Godot but I was under the impression that a Hello World in any of those for the web would be about 20MB where as the Three.js game I'm working on will be at most 1MB when done (not counting game music soundtrack).

Sure, but so will be the native app.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#339

Post by nchmy »

streptomycin wrote: post #100
perons wrote: post #98

One comment that I haven't seen yet and that puts PWA for Games in jeopardy: the maximum caching allowed for Safari PWA's (thus the whole iOS ecossystem) is only 50mb. Most mid-core / hardcore mobile games are bigger than that after downloading remote assets when the app loads for the first time, and this means a player of a mid-core PWA game would have to redownload a good chunk of the assets everytime the game load…

The 50mb limit no longer exists, it's much higher now https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198133#c15 Safari will delete your cached data if your app goes unused for a little while though. Native apps may do the same thing though... at least on Android I get notifications about it deleting cached data for native apps I haven't used recently.

If the app is added to the home screen, then it is exempted from having it's data wiped after 7 days without usage.

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#intelligent-tracking...

And good docs on storage quotas on different browsers.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...

I think there's also benefits of using persistent storage

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#340

Post by thot_experiment »

wruza wrote: post #323
thot_experiment wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. (though I think my broader point about cross platform support unfortunately still stands, I personally don't care about supporting iOS on my side projects and I'm excited to mess with this)

I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. That’s usually a sign nobody uses it because it has at least one large issue. Personally I stopped falling for “there’s now X” advices long ago because if it worked, it would already be mainstream very much heard of by everyone. Sorry for your five hours.

I disagree at least a little bit, the fact that there's support on the browser side is much much more important than support on the server. I can write a server of arbitrary complexity given enough time, the scope of the problem is now one that I can fix.

I also found the following in my research yesterday, which looks like a very promising set of abstractions for WebRTC data channels.

https://github.com/geckosio/geckos.io

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