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- Hacker News
- How is it that this came to my Apple-Silicon Mac before Valve could do it natively? How could it possibly be easier to create a complete-enough virtual machine that runs in a browser and the compiler for it than it is to port the native application?
I wish we could spend as much time on native application development as we do on horribly crippled and slow browser application development.
Web technology is so non-sensical to me. "you can run an application without installing it!" Well, friend, installation is not required either, and we can deliver applications on demand, and we've done it before. "You just visit a page and you can program the macros on your keyboard!" Again, it's not like those applications are large; they could be delivered on demand if we wanted.
But we don't want that, do we? We want people to remain online under any circumstance, we desparately want their time, so we require that people be online if they want to program their microcontroller and they don't know how to do it without visiting the very convenient webpage.
If people spent 10% of the effort on native applications that they spent on web applications, we would be so much further advanced than we are now. If you're a developer, targeting the web is so seductive, so easy in comparison, that we all have to be online to do anything, now. We all have to run two dozen Electron apps because developers want to have an easy time at the expense of every user.
by naikrovek - That's a somewhat reaching use of the word "natively".
It's being run through the equivalent of a virtual machine. So it's really quite similar to the layers used to abstract away platform specifics like Wine / Proton does for Windows compatibility. Instead of DXVK you have WebGL.
by 0x6c6f6c - > I wish we could spend as much time on native application development as we do on horribly crippled and slow browser application development.
But native to what?
Windows is no longer the commonality between all users.
The browser has that role, now.
> We want people to remain online under any circumstance
Webapps often have offline-first functionality,
which is one of the biggest strengths of a progressive web app.
by DANmode - > How is it that this came to my Apple-Silicon Mac before Valve could do it natively?
Why should Valve update their old games to work on Apple Silicon? They're old and only 2% of Steam users (clients?) are on macOS.
Also, this port works offline in your browser. If you've loaded it up before the assets are cached and you can play with no internet. Yes, even if you've closed the tab and open it again later without internet.
by Rohansi - I've played this from the start until around Ravenholm probably close to a hundred times. It's so familiar to me. There's some funky stuff going on for me, though. The characters' eyes are all wrong. G-man had no eyes at all. And the giant screen with Breen on it was missing.
Can't believe it runs as well as it does on my non-gaming laptop without even seeming to struggle. It's funny when you leave a hobby for a while. I haven't played games since the HL2 era so for me this is still state of the art.
I did say a couple of years ago that if HL3 ever came out, and it was good, that it would make me buy another gaming PC. But with current prices I don't even think that would make me do it.
- I just wish Valve could add official macos-arm64 builds of the various hl2 games on Steam :-/by 0x0
- Whew. Crashed before I sunk my day there.by entropyneur
- Did it also crash on the part where you exit into the city square? Cause that's where it crashed for me.by butlike
- As much as I dislike webdev stuff, I love the way you can distribute entire programs through WASM. Super cool stuff! For those who are interested, I recommend checking out Godot for exporting games on the web. It's really easy to do and you can host it on Itch.ioby LandenLove
- Isn't Godot kinda flawed for deploying to the web? For example, no C# as of now, although there have been plenty of efforts to make it work. Or AFAIU audio being forced to stay in the main thread which can cause glitches. I just mean that it's not all fun and games as soon as you want to make a more ambitious game and not just a quick demo or game jam thingy.by roflcopter69
- I remember saving up for a year to buy the ATI Radeon 9600 XT (I think it was $200 MSRP) so I could play the game on high settings. Now we can play it inside a virtual machine on a crappy laptop. What a journeyby typon
- Same here - splashed out crazy money upgrading my PC to play HL2.
After that moment I switched to consoles.
by comprev - I was just going to say the same thing. I couldn't afford the rigs needed to run any of these games and never really played them. Now, it's running inside a browser on a laptop.
- I remember when the game files got hacked before release, and you could run around in half completed maps and small area snippets. I spent hours running around in awe of the new physics engineby WarmWash
- In a few years todays high end AI models will run on your watch
Of course that assumes we maintain open access to compute that we've enjoyed for the last half century, and I doubt that very much.
Stallman warned about the dangers of software being closed [0] 30 years ago, and the majority of modern IT industry just laugh a that sort of stuff because you can't make a billion dollar startup with that attitude, but I think the restrictions on owning the hardware at all will probably come first.
by iso1631 - Cool!
I recently ported Doom on browser so that you can easily play multi-player (up to 4) completely free (you can host it yourself on Cloudflare)
by postatic - That is so wicked cool, I’m going to try this later today!!by chamomeal
- Cool, so now I can leave my lawnmower where it belongs.by rwoerz
- 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?"by hwc
- The fact the site died after being posted here might be an indication why :-P.
- Because you'd be missing the market and monetization layer that Steam so conveniently provides.by nnevatie
- Remember that any time the browser gets more free-reign on the PC it will be 0.01% used in good faith and 99.99% either unintentionally misused or maliciously abused to make computers worse for people who don't know how to diagnose these things.
Just look at web notifications. Maybe it's nice that you can get email alerts on your PC without having to install an app, but now every news site and sketchy clickfarm on the planet is trying to send notifications to get grandma back on their website, showing her ads.
Users are so accustomed to popups and cookie banners and what have you, they've been trained to click "sure, accept, whatever, just let me use the website" so permissions prompts may as well not exist.
I do not like the effort to make webapps as capable as desktop apps. Visiting a website and hitting "accept" which could easily be done by accident should not be offering anywhere near the level of trust and permissions to my system as installing an application. The friction of installing an application is not an inconvenience, it's a feature.
by hbn - 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?).by nickpeterson
- 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 small game. 60GB+ is quite common now (the more recent call of duties tip the scales at 140GB)by kllrnohj
- Tech people underestimate how much gamers care about performance
You see that a lot with all the game streaming platforms like Stadia
There's a whole mainstream culture of custom building PCs to maximize performance/value and YT channels focused on game perf like digital foundry are super popular
by ex-aws-dude - 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
by dandersch - 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 (including a 10 bucks Rasperry Pi Zero which can also be an AP, a phone obviously, heck even a e-cig!) then it doesn't matter what is "blocked" as it can be brought to anyone with no installation.
by utopiah - 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.by account42
- People have hosted banned book libraries in Minecraft.by tencentshill
- I made the old MMO EverQuest but in a browser, complete with a custom server built from the ground up. It's in a bit of a state of transition right now and sorta buggy, but:
It shares the neat feature of the HL2 project in that it doesn't need any installation, and it downloads zone files (which aren't huge) as needed. It can also run around and kill/loot things automatically for you!
by brynnbee