QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten • Hacker News Board

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#61

Post by jchw » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #29

jchw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... the issues with Adobe Flash are quite a bit more varied than “politics.” At best, it was always a drag on mobile platforms, reducing battery life and hogging resources, and at worst it’s pretty much best known now for its security issues that ultimately helped further its demise. If you want to go a step further, in 2011 you could also have probably delivered your game as an NPAPI extension and got pure native co…

Apple speech I guess. It was perfectly fine on any Symbian and Android device I got to play with, and much better than J2ME ever was.

iPhone never had Flash I don’t believe. I was an Android user at the time and the only way Flash on my device could be described is in terms of locomotive incidents. Flash games and applications almost worked, although virtually none of them were responsively designed, and they mostly worked pretty poorly with touch controls, and unlike HTML there was no way to reasonably work around or improve this at the browser level, because it was just a big proprietary black box.

Worse than this was sites that used Flash in non-essential ways like ads. If you had Flash enabled on a blog or other site that just happened to pop up a flash ad, it would make the whole page janky, greatly hurting pan and zoom functionality and killing your battery life for no benefit.

Worst of all, Flash frequently crashed my browser and sometimes even caused the entire phone to reboot.

Phones now have better CPUs and GPUs and I am relieved beyond words that Flash is totally dead now. It was never ideal for what it was most popular for (videos, streams) which only became apparent after the alternatives stabilized. But even for games and other software, I just don’t think the NPAPI browser plugin model was worth keeping. Would the problems with touch usability and accessibility be resolved at some point? Maybe I don’t know - I presume Adobe Air was able to do it for native apps, although my experience with Adobe Air apps was also not very good.

J2ME may have been not the most thrilling platform, but I’d not be surprised if it had a better security track record at the end of the day. I disabled Flash before most people, and was using a userscript to use the then-new and buggy tag for YouTube. I still, before that point, had been personally hit by a Flash 0day, and a couple of my friends got hit later by a malicious Mediafire Flash payload. There was a period of time where it felt like there was a new use-after-free in Flash every month. And when you look at all of the functionality stacked into this unsandboxed blackbox to keep it competitive and alive, I don’t feel it’s terribly surprising.

I don’t enjoy everything about the bloated platform that is the modern web, but the design of it is a lot more sound. It’s designed more as a platform than a product. You get a lot of totally brand new functionality, like WebRTC, that just wasn’t really going to happen with Flash.

Flash had to die. It wasn’t a part of the web platform, it was part of an Adobe product that was shoehorned into web browsers. If it has a good legacy, I reckon it will mostly be from nostalgia fueled denial.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#62

Post by frompdx » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

rjeli wrote: post #59

frompdx wrote: post #54

This is great. Does anyone remember quakelive? Around 2010 it was playable in the browser via a browser plugin. Loved playing it on my macbook. I don't recall if the plugin was flash or a java applet but when support stopped for those quakelive moved to steam as a desktop app. Edit: Per wikipedia it used NAPI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Live

Not sure the specifics, but I don’t think it was flash or java because you had to install a native extension.

Ah it looks like you are correct. It used the NAPI. Per wikipedia:

> In November 2013, citing the planned deprecation of NPAPI browser plug-ins by major browsers, Quake Live began to phase out its browser version and began migrating to a standalone client. However, this change necessitated the removal of OS X and Linux support from the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Live

Now I remember why I stopped playing as I only had a macbook at the time.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#63

Post by hjanssen » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #47

modeless wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasm has been here for years already. There's no flood of issues waiting for some cue to be released. It's no worse than any other part of the browser; probably better than some. Besides, modern browsers don't rely solely on one sandbox anymore. There are many levels of protection now.

CPUs were deemed unexploitable, until researchers had a better look into them. The only thing that makes WebAssembly safer than its predecessors, is that most security researchers haven't yet bothered with it.

Which is already true for any type of software.

Bugs exist everywhere. Of course you finde some if you put in the effort. That is not something that marks the quality of the code.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#64

Post by airstrike » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

All I get is Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://content.quakejs.com/assets/manifest.json. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing).

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#65

Post by alouis44 » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

benjojo12 wrote: post #21

EDIT: This appears to have died, now that the content servers for quakejs have died. My servers are no longer starting anymore :(. For those reading on later, there was peak of 10 on both servers just before it went down ioq3 1.36_GIT_4f7d7bf-2014-02-01 emscripten- Feb 23 2014 ----- FS_Startup ----- Error: Failed to download and parse manifest, Couldn't load http://content.quakejs.com/assets/manifest.json. Status: 50…

https://openarena.live/

Here's a link to the open source version of Quake called Open Arena, compiled to WASM and using WebRTC for matchmaking.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#66

Post by jjoonathan » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #45

BubRoss wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring this nonsense up in every webasm thread and every time it is explained to you that webasm does no IO and is contained in the same environment as javascript. Every time you either bring up details that have nothing to actually do with webasm or you say something vague about possible security problems in the future. If you have real criticism based on real information, let's see it.

You mean the same JS engines that already have several entries on the CVE database? Yeah, really safe.

It has a looooong way to go before it's as bad as flash.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#67

Post by skibz » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

benjojo12 wrote: post #21

EDIT: This appears to have died, now that the content servers for quakejs have died. My servers are no longer starting anymore :(. For those reading on later, there was peak of 10 on both servers just before it went down ioq3 1.36_GIT_4f7d7bf-2014-02-01 emscripten- Feb 23 2014 ----- FS_Startup ----- Error: Failed to download and parse manifest, Couldn't load http://content.quakejs.com/assets/manifest.json. Status: 50…

Adjusting the FOV and resolution is also worthwhile if you have a widescreen monitor.

Open the console with ~ and enter:

  r_mode -1
  r_customheight 1080
  r_customwidth 1920
  cg_fov 100

Simply replace the height/width and FOV with your desired values, and enjoy the game in native resolution and wider field of view.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#68

Post by lgl » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

starpilot wrote: post #43

tachyonbeam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on when you discovered the game and what you played most. Quake I was the first "true" 3D game (with levels that could stack rooms vertically), and many people remember it very fondly. Personally, I really enjoyed Quake II. I did play Quake III when it came out, but the lack of a single player mode meant the game had no backstory at all.

When Q3 came out everyone was bored of single player. It looked like the whole industry was going that way and that single player FPS was pretty much dead. Then Half-Life was released and blew everyone's minds. I don't think anyone has been able to craft an experience like HL to this day, it's like they just "get" how interactive fiction should feel rather than being a shoot-em-up interspersed with cutscenes.

This is wrong, Half Life was released in 1998, quake 3 arena in 1999.

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#69

Post by octocop » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

frompdx wrote: post #54

This is great. Does anyone remember quakelive? Around 2010 it was playable in the browser via a browser plugin. Loved playing it on my macbook. I don't recall if the plugin was flash or a java applet but when support stopped for those quakelive moved to steam as a desktop app. Edit: Per wikipedia it used NAPI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Live

I remember that! Perfect LAN game

Re: QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten

#70

Post by jchw » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

miedpo wrote: post #55

jchw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... the issues with Adobe Flash are quite a bit more varied than “politics.” At best, it was always a drag on mobile platforms, reducing battery life and hogging resources, and at worst it’s pretty much best known now for its security issues that ultimately helped further its demise. If you want to go a step further, in 2011 you could also have probably delivered your game as an NPAPI extension and got pure native co…

The first part of this isn't quite correct if I am remembering correctly. Flash (or at least the engine behind it) is still on both Android and iPhone platforms through its app equivelant called Air. There's a lot of things that use Air... to give you an idea, Angry Birds was first written and deployed to Air. So though Apple complained about performance issues, they were not the biggest deal. If I was to take a gues…

Flash on Android existed, and I actually used it, and I can pretty much guarantee you it was never going to be competitive with the way it ran on contemporary smart phones. I don’t get how Flash applets on a website were ever at risk of competing with the app store. HTML and PWA is a more compelling option today than I think Flash ever was, and Apple contributed greatly to that fact with Webkit...