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).
I visited this page in Firefox and was presented with a message that essentialy said (paraphrasing): "this site best viewed with browser X". Now, I'm not a professional web developer, and maybe there are legitimate reasons why this app is depending on new cutting edge browser features that aren't yet supported by Firefox, but it seems to me that this just shouldn't be a thing anymore.
I have tried that one and it truly baffles me. If you play it you'll notice the movement of the ships is extremely smooth, vs the original where ships only rotated in increments of 45 degrees.
> 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)
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.
Interestingly, these Wasm ports are all about nostalgia games.
I sort-of wish we would live in 1998 (when HL1 was released). Less social network, a more creative internet, LAN parties, IRC / ICQ, easier new connections.
We now have tailwind / material UI, a locked-down Apple ecosystem, Photoshop with millions of nagging screens, centralized mega-corps like OpenAI, and the first bits of World War 3 where drones and robotics are made to kill people.
Misses a lot this free internet (though 1 USD / minute)
It is so easy to not use tailwind, apple, photoshop, or openai. It's really easy to stay off of social networks. Computers are smaller/easier to move so lan parties are easier (although as a real adult with a real job they're harder to pull off).
The world war 3 bits suck, i'll admit, but most of the "early internet" stuff that people are nostalgic about still exists, you just have to look for it.
Any tips for finding these things like communities? Seems like most communities are private now unless you know people in meat space. Living in a rural area, those opportunities are far and few between for me.
Yeah but my port is better because it supports phones/touch and gamepads and multiplayer over UDP and has better performance and a bunch of other small details.
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.
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 emulation and pretends towards the process that everything around him (incl. drivers) are the 32-bit ones.
One of the big things here is that Intel and ARM processors are backwards-compatible with 32-bit instructions, even if they are 64-bit processors. Apple Silicon on the other hand is not, which is why Apple completely dropped support before switching.
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
Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2. Apple is guilty of many sins, but this isn't one of them. Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. The binary was already obsolete before it even left Bellevue.
> 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.
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.
That’s because the 64bit upgrade to Creation Engine happened with the Fallout 4 development cycle when 64bit was widespread. Skyrim was also targeting Xbox 360 and PS3 which were still 32bit. FO4 is when the calculus changed for all the target platforms so thats when the engine was upgraded.
They didn't develop it from scratch though! The 2010 Mac HL2 binaries are a port of the existing 32 bit Windows product, with all the word size and alignment issues you'd expect for C++ code of that vintage. You don't magically wave a wand and expect high performance code to work when sizeof(void*) changes, and the effort to do that needs to be weighed against the perceived value and the size of the market.
Needless to say, annoying a bunch of HN nerds a quarter century in the future wasn't on Valve's radar. They just wanted some Mac revenue and picked the low hanging fruit.
> Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2.
What? First, those chips were plenty powerful to run HL2 (the game predates them). And second, all x86_64 chips can run older x86 32-bit code unmodified.
The reason macOS stopped supporting 32-bit code has nothing to do with the processors but more about them wanting to remove support for 32-bit binaries from the kernel and from all user-space libraries. To run a 32-bit binary, you need itself and all libraries it depends on to be 32-bit too, including the syscall boundary, which is "fine" (both Windows and Linux do this just fine, so it's really on Apple to have removed this). And I suppose Apple removed those because it was building towards a 64-bit-only world to simplify the Apple Silicon transition.
The CPUs were powerful enough, sure. The GPUs (Intel GMA950) absolutely weren't. Even on Windows with better drivers, Half-Life 2 is a slideshow on that class of hardware.
E.x. notebookcheck indicates that FEAR (released a yearish later) could get 20-30ish FPS at 640x480 but chokes at 1024x768 (at numbers matching the HL2 lost coast demo slideshow at 1024x768).
Gotta remember a lot of mac people were just happy to play something more modern than Marathon or Giants CK
The don’t let backwards compatibility stop them from doing anything, but I don’t think they go out of their way to target games. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
All 32-bit support got dropped, so you're totally right. It might appear to target games because games are disproportionately likely to not get updated to new archs and to be run long after they were introduced. Nobody is going back to run some 32-bit-only RSS reader or text editor from 2007 even though there surely were some.
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.
Everything in the process has to agree on how big the pointers are, or you need code to convert between the formats at the boundary. That means you either need 32-bit versions of all OS libraries, or you need a complicated shim layer. Apple went for having 32-bit versions of all OS libraries. But this isn't free to maintain, and they dropped them after a few years.
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.
they're not saying it's fair to consumers, they're saying "it's not just apple, microsoft does it too", i.e. that judgement on apple should be made in the context of how its competitors behaved
I think they are saying the fair comparison should be what another 1st party GPU maker supports in their 1st party drivers, not whether or not Windows provides 1st party Vulkan implementation for 3rd party hardware.
Microsoft has the OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan compatibility pack. Major issue is that it's just Mesa compiled to a D3D12 GPU backend, so if you have anything but Snapdragon it's basically useless.
Valve wanted steam to co-exist on the mac in the early days and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I
Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to support games on the machine. Myst was only few that were exclusive to the Mac; that they then ported to PC.
Apple runs a gaming subscription service which goes so far as to pay developers for timed exclusivity to Apple platforms. It may be true that in the early days of the Mac, Apple decided games were bad for their brand. This clearly is not true today.
Apple is so obsessed with how their product is marketed and perceived that they all but eliminated gaming on the platform. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been effective, but I'll never understand why people accept that the people who make the computer should decide how you use it.
I wouldn't say 'eliminated gaming', they just have they've put a lot of encouragement into Mac gaming in recent years to the point that they're maintaining Rosetta 2 for game ports (via Crossover/Wine/Proton) even after its broader deprecation.
The main issue IMO is the Apple hardware itself isn't focused on raw performance, it's on energy efficiency and mobility. You'd need a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio at least to have the GPU cores & RAM to play the most recent PC games. And so they just tend to lead with casual games, live service games, and second run AAA games. Technically Apple maintains the world's largest gaming platform (by users & revenue) in iOS.
And plenty of AAA games have been ported to macOS like Cyberpunk 2077, the last few Assassin Creeds (Shadows, Mirage), or even iOS/iPadOS/visionOS like Control & Death Stranding, the recent Assassin's Creeds, Resident Evil 2 & 4 Remakes, RE 7 & 8, Civ 6 & Civ 7, etc.
It's weird, they still try to market it as a machine you can play games on. They make sure a lot of games make it over. It's just never the new cool ones, it's always stuff like a resident evil game from a few years ago or death stranding
It's because the hardware can't really handle the latest and greatest games unless you get the top end hardware. Their GPU innovation is on letting you run an AAA game from 5 years ago on a tablet.
On paper qemu should be able to do this. The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU. Without Apple putting effort into supporting this with e.g. documentation, that's a bit hard. That's also holding back linux support on Apple hardware. But it's a fixable problem that will only get easier as hw gets better and faster over time.
At what resolution. You're not going to software render 4K120FPS even with 2000s graphics. But you also don't need a software implementation since translating to a host API isn't really any harder than that (and often much easier). And this already exists in Wine.
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.
Curious though about the bugs. Right at the start, as g-man talks his eyes are missing textures and his mouth doesn't move. Both of those bugs continue, when I get to the part where the guard removes his mask, his lips don't move and the video monitor doesn't change to show the professor.
Is it just a minor oversight or is that something hard to fix?
Booting up the original, some shadows and other graphic details are missing.
Not complaining! Just curious. It made we want to play again!
How (why) does that site block reader mode... At least on Firefox Android it offers the reader mode button, but turning it on just redirects back to the page (which is too wide, hence the reader mode attempt)
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.
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!
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.
Tricky to block WASM. A lot of useful Websites use for genuinely good usage. Can be for syntax highlighting, chess engine, etc and the same goes for WebGL or WebGPU, they are used for responsive UI in dashboard, for data visualization, for video rendering with effects e.g. blurring a background behind a person thus privacy, etc. Blocking either of those would break a lot of modern useful Websites.
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?"
- 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)
> 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.
Pretty dishonest to imply that C# is commonly used in Godot. The vast majority of games are Gdscript which exports to browsers perfectly
Unreal Engine 5 does support the web, albeit as a third party implementation (my company)
We spent the last several years building out a WebGPU RHI for UE5, along with tooling to make games load fast using asset streaming, while using less memory. We were recently featured by Gamesbeat.
You can read more about it below or check out our website:
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)
> 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
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.
Unity doesn't use C# for everything. Notably the game engine itself is not C# but C++. C# is essentially just the scripting language.
You're also ignoring the overhead of WASM -> WebGPU -> native graphics API, not to mention how much harder it is to develop and debug that platform than it is a native one.
Unity is just an example. And depending on the game you may actually be doing heavy work in "just the scripting language" instead of the engine. XNA, MonoGame, Love2D, etc. are all frameworks rather than game engines so they're absolutely doing typical engine work in the scripting language, if you need a different example.
> You're also ignoring the overhead of WASM -> WebGPU -> native graphics API
Wine -> DXVK -> native graphics API works great for many people. I can't imagine it having significantly worse performance characteristics, especially when WebGPU is closer to the native graphics API than DirectX on Linux is.
> not to mention how much harder it is to develop and debug that platform than it is a native one.
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?).
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
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.
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.io
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.
Godot 3.x supports C# on the web because it uses Mono.
Godot 4.x migrated to CoreCLR since Mono is a dead end, but Microsoft insists on .NET being the entrypoint in a WASM build. MS initially promised support for .NET being invoked by something else but dropped the feature, leaving Godot stranded. The current proposal is to make Godot a library (libgodot) invoked by .NET.
I found GDScript to be quite powerful in terms of functionality. I don't have experience in professional game Dev to be aware of the benefits of C# beyond it being the industry standard for Unity.
Single threaded audio is a big concern. I haven't implemented music in my game yet to know if it is a deal breaker.
The main problem that I have run into is shader compilation stutters on the compatibility render. Makes the game basically unplayable. My work around was to spawn certain objects on the main menu out of sight to force compilation. I believe the forward renderer has some pre-compilation.
Of course it's a matter of perspective and I can totally get how one would be happy with GDScript. Tbh, it's hard to beat GDScript when it comes to making small games. It's quite evident that only GDScript has first-class integration into the Editor, C# comes second and all the other serious language bindings come third.
I might state the obvious here, but static typing, null-safety, being able to refactor and such things make C# much much better for bigger games. Slay the Spire 2 has been made with Godot + C# and people have already decompiled and peeked under the hood (for example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpB4-W9L4ec) and imo it shows quite well how certain patterns simply require a more powerful language than GDScript or would at least be very painful and fragile to make in GDScript.
Your workaround for shader stuttering sounds quite hilarious :D I don't mean it's bad. It seems pragmatic in a good sense. But yeah, it's those limitations that pile up when making Godot target the web...
gdscript is missing basic features like interfaces (only abstract classes with no multiple inheritance) or custom value types. spawning scenes from code is tricky and not type safe. asset loading and globals are a mess. the engine is built around using a lot of nodes but nodes are expensive, so you need to drop down to confusing low level server apis if you have performance issues.
the worst part is theres no defined build step so `@tool` scripts run both in the editor and at export time. its easy to accidentally crash the editor or mess up your scene with a bad editor script missing one line of code. and as far as i remember its impossible to undo so remember to save often.
godot is still the best option if you want a open source engine for your game but only because bevy is not production ready yet.
Does anyone know some of the rebinded controls? The main menu doesn't show them and I can't figure out how to reopen the menu during gameplay or any using the bindings that are usually set to the function keys. The page doesn't seem to have any info included like that kind of thing.
Edit 1: crouch is bound to C according to the blog post, but that's the only one mentioned.
Edit 2: You can use key_listboundkeys from console. Also can just open the menu with `
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 journey
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 engine
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.
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.
A few years ago, before I bought a Nintendo for my kid, he was playing Minecraft on an iPad. I tried to pair a Bluetooth controller, and had no luck. I think the OS was too locked down. At the same time, I could connect a Bluetooth controller to my Android phone and play Minecraft with no problem.
In fact, I've said for a long time that I wish I had a nice Android tablet with a Tegra chip that I could both use as regular tablet and as a game system.
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 the content at all.
What's the biggest bottleneck you hit - GPU compute, memory bandwidth, or network latency for asset streaming? Curious how it compares to native WebGPU.
1) They were in browsers since 2000s. Then Steve Jobs held a grudge with Adobe and Flash took a major blow. Today, we successfuly reinvented the wheel using "open" technologies - on the client side at least, the authoring tools of Flash are still uncomparable.
2) WebAssembly, compiling the leaked HL2 code. The graphics stack is WebGL.
3) Absolutely illegal, it exists until a cease&desist comes from Valve. We may see it taken down even today. They aren't.
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.
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.
So this port isn't a straight WASM port, you're saying they're running the Windows binary and translating the DirectX8 graphic commands over to WebGL..? Am I understanding correctly?
> 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.
browsers aren't common either. Standards, formats, and interfaces are, which is exactly what WASM is and what this demonstrates. Native apps don't need a common operating system or even a common core like nix. They just need to support a common interface, like browsers do.
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.
Tried it on my M4 iPad Pro and was surprised that it works - to a degree. NPCs (Gman and the citizens on the train) seem to be missing eyes and have no mouth animations. FPS was pretty poor too, and it was ass to use the camera on the trackpad.
I loaded this up on my old Intel MacBook half-expecting it to crash instantly, and it actually ran through the train station at a solid clip before falling over in the canals. Anyone know how the shader work compares to the actual Source engine?
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.
But what about the people who aren't idiots and can read sarcasm without the /s? I reflexively downvote ever comment I come across with a /s. People aren't idiots until you treat them like one.
But what about people who are in different parts of the world and don't inherently understand your meaning? That is terrible behaviour to downvote the notation.
Text is notorious for not conveying context. Sarcasm can easily be seen as serious by some people, why is why we have the /s notation to make it obvious.
People aren't idiots, they come from different backgrounds, locations, languages, and all use English as a common tongue. Have some consideration and stop thinking you are so big and clever.
The best sarcasm is exactly the one where it could be interpreted as written and people misreading it is part of the fun. If you are going to add sarcasm marks to make sure that absolutely everyone gets what you are intending then whats the point of using sarcasm in the first place instead of clearly writing what you mean?
Ah yeah the famously equal acts of pirating a game VS promoting illegal unregulated gambling for millions of people (and that's just the tip of the iceberg).
That's why corporations can get away with everything.
Valve already gave Half-Life 2 away for free, and released the source code of the HL1 engine.
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Giving things away for free (at one point) is not the same as making it public domain or relinquishing your (copy)rights. Source available is not the same as open source. Open source code does not mean open source assets/product. I find it weird that this needs to be explained in this community.
> Giving things away for free is not the same as making it public domain or relinquishing your (copy)rights.
Obviously. But it does kill the usual "piracy is bad because companies lose money" argument - especially for a 22-year-old game.
> Source available is not the same as open source.
Obviously. But it does show that Valve is more interested in preserving old genre-defying games for the general public, rather than milking every last cent of revenue out of it.
GoldSrc (HL1 engine) is very much not open source (or even source available). There's at least one open source remake (which is possibly illegal due to using the SDK) but no official release.
That was a special promotion with a defined end date. The game is not free. The only legitimate way to obtain it currently is to pay for it. Together with the false claim about HL1 being open source, you're really adding a lot of misinformation to this thread.
> Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
So that makes it okay to pirate and steal games developed by your fellow indie game developers as well?
> Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Try doing the same thing to Nintendo.
Even large companies like Anthropic were not going to risk going to trial and getting bankrupted of over $120B+ in damages in using pirated copyrighted eBooks for training. The best case was a settlement for $1.5B which that is a record settlement in copyright law.
This project seems perfectly congruent with current year industry standards regarding copyright, which are to move fast and lobby for permission later.
A crime is a crime even before a judge rules over it. Sure, innocent until proven guilty, but most people know when they're doing something wrong and then don't do it.
Of course, this is a lot more grey area for copyright violations etc because it's a civil matter.
Pithy but untrue. The verbose-but-correct statement is about procedural prerequisites: Government officials are forbidden to imprison or fine you until your guilt is proved, to an impartial and properly-instructed jury in a fair trial, beyond a reasonable doubt. (The Scots have the better formulation for criminal cases: Guilty, or not proved.)
Illustration: OJ Simpson was found not guilty [sic] in his criminal trial. So he couldn't be imprisoned. But then a different jury found — under the lower, preponderance of the evidence standard — that Simpson did indeed murder his ex-wife and the other guy. The latter case was the civil action for wrongful death, brought by the survivors of his victims. The survivors won a $33.5M verdict. Simpson's assets were seized, and sold at a court-ordered auction, to pay the judgment — including his Heisman Trophy.
It's quite dangerous to make unsubstantiated comments and assumptions on US copyright law without the proper research.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
> just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent
I don't think the parent comment is claiming it's legal, other than the (unlikely) chance that this is licensed, just that it's up to Valve to enforce and not really our concern. A lot of cool things (like the similar https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.
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).
Here's RuneScape 2 in a browser: https://2004.lostcity.rs/client?world=2&detail=high&method=0
Hey I'm playing that right now!
There's also Ultima Online in the browser (sanctioned by the official servers). I'm one of the maintainers.
https://retail.classicuo.org/
I visited this page in Firefox and was presented with a message that essentialy said (paraphrasing): "this site best viewed with browser X". Now, I'm not a professional web developer, and maybe there are legitimate reasons why this app is depending on new cutting edge browser features that aren't yet supported by Firefox, but it seems to me that this just shouldn't be a thing anymore.
> new cutting edge browser features
Mozilla hates the FS api, it's existed for years but seemingly isn't going to happen in Firefox.
What feature was Firefox missing for it?
It requires a paid account though, doesn't it?
From this mondain to the maintainers, thanks!
What!? Amazing.
> sanctioned
Oh you mean it is or isn't approved.
come on man i got work to do
GTA vice city https://quenq.com/apps/vice-city/
Sadly that one seems to have been removed.
Click into the directory. It's there and you can access it that way.
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/
I seem to recall that Doom 3 was unplayable dark on my PC, once upon a time.
Same too, now it's my haze and night blindness vision.
Also The Simpsons Hit & Run! https://shar-wasm.cjoseph.workers.dev/
It works so seamlessly on macOS at 6016x3384. What a delight.
And Diablo: https://devilutionx.app
And Red Alert 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853
I have tried that one and it truly baffles me. If you play it you'll notice the movement of the ships is extremely smooth, vs the original where ships only rotated in increments of 45 degrees.
I wonder how they did this.
On first look it looks like interpolated frames
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)
Ah yes I mean command and conquer 2 red alert - go easy on me it is a bit confusing
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/.
Ha fun--works in my regular laptop in Chrome without any CPU/GPU etc spikes
And CS: https://play-cs.com
And Duke Nukem 3D made by my friend Gawen: https://gawen.me/webduke
That was fun thank you, haven't played quake 3 in awhile, so many memory neurons firing!
Everyone posting links made me want to find HL1 in browser: https://x8bitrain.github.io/webXash/
noclip website is so dang cool, petition for them to add music. I'd cry if I could hear those ragnarok map songs while exploring.
Also xonotic! https://www.xonotic.gg/
I vibe coded this for exploring levels in the original Deus Ex: https://dxwebview.pages.dev/ (https://github.com/addrummond/dxwebview).
It's a bit janky owing to the vibe coding, but the basic functionality works pretty well. You need the original game data files to use it.
What a time to be alive
What a time, but at what cost ?
Interestingly, these Wasm ports are all about nostalgia games.
I sort-of wish we would live in 1998 (when HL1 was released). Less social network, a more creative internet, LAN parties, IRC / ICQ, easier new connections.
We now have tailwind / material UI, a locked-down Apple ecosystem, Photoshop with millions of nagging screens, centralized mega-corps like OpenAI, and the first bits of World War 3 where drones and robotics are made to kill people.
Misses a lot this free internet (though 1 USD / minute)
It is so easy to not use tailwind, apple, photoshop, or openai. It's really easy to stay off of social networks. Computers are smaller/easier to move so lan parties are easier (although as a real adult with a real job they're harder to pull off).
The world war 3 bits suck, i'll admit, but most of the "early internet" stuff that people are nostalgic about still exists, you just have to look for it.
> you just have to look for it.
Any tips for finding these things like communities? Seems like most communities are private now unless you know people in meat space. Living in a rural area, those opportunities are far and few between for me.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memepediadankmemes/images/...
Happy Monday everybody!
Your comment is jarringly out of place, which is why it's getting downvoted.
> And Quake 3 There is QuakeJS as well.
Yeah but my port is better because it supports phones/touch and gamepads and multiplayer over UDP and has better performance and a bunch of other small details.
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.
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 emulation and pretends towards the process that everything around him (incl. drivers) are the 32-bit ones.
Source: Microsoft.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081222-00/?p=19...
One of the big things here is that Intel and ARM processors are backwards-compatible with 32-bit instructions, even if they are 64-bit processors. Apple Silicon on the other hand is not, which is why Apple completely dropped support before switching.
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
Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2. Apple is guilty of many sins, but this isn't one of them. Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place. The binary was already obsolete before it even left Bellevue.
> 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.
That’s because the 64bit upgrade to Creation Engine happened with the Fallout 4 development cycle when 64bit was widespread. Skyrim was also targeting Xbox 360 and PS3 which were still 32bit. FO4 is when the calculus changed for all the target platforms so thats when the engine was upgraded.
They didn't develop it from scratch though! The 2010 Mac HL2 binaries are a port of the existing 32 bit Windows product, with all the word size and alignment issues you'd expect for C++ code of that vintage. You don't magically wave a wand and expect high performance code to work when sizeof(void*) changes, and the effort to do that needs to be weighed against the perceived value and the size of the market.
Needless to say, annoying a bunch of HN nerds a quarter century in the future wasn't on Valve's radar. They just wanted some Mac revenue and picked the low hanging fruit.
> Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2.
What? First, those chips were plenty powerful to run HL2 (the game predates them). And second, all x86_64 chips can run older x86 32-bit code unmodified.
The reason macOS stopped supporting 32-bit code has nothing to do with the processors but more about them wanting to remove support for 32-bit binaries from the kernel and from all user-space libraries. To run a 32-bit binary, you need itself and all libraries it depends on to be 32-bit too, including the syscall boundary, which is "fine" (both Windows and Linux do this just fine, so it's really on Apple to have removed this). And I suppose Apple removed those because it was building towards a 64-bit-only world to simplify the Apple Silicon transition.
The CPUs were powerful enough, sure. The GPUs (Intel GMA950) absolutely weren't. Even on Windows with better drivers, Half-Life 2 is a slideshow on that class of hardware.
Depends a LOT on the res.
E.x. notebookcheck indicates that FEAR (released a yearish later) could get 20-30ish FPS at 640x480 but chokes at 1024x768 (at numbers matching the HL2 lost coast demo slideshow at 1024x768).
Gotta remember a lot of mac people were just happy to play something more modern than Marathon or Giants CK
Apple goes way out of their way every few years to ensure old games stop working
Lest we forget how they snubbed Bungie...
The don’t let backwards compatibility stop them from doing anything, but I don’t think they go out of their way to target games. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
All 32-bit support got dropped, so you're totally right. It might appear to target games because games are disproportionately likely to not get updated to new archs and to be run long after they were introduced. Nobody is going back to run some 32-bit-only RSS reader or text editor from 2007 even though there surely were some.
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.
Everything in the process has to agree on how big the pointers are, or you need code to convert between the formats at the boundary. That means you either need 32-bit versions of all OS libraries, or you need a complicated shim layer. Apple went for having 32-bit versions of all OS libraries. But this isn't free to maintain, and they dropped them after a few years.
There's a way to compile HL2 on ARM Macs, I've written a guide here: https://rakhim.exotext.com/how-to-play-half-life-2-on-mchip-...
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.
I admit that Valve’s approach to Steam on macOS has never made sense to me.
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.
I don't think Valve funded Proton and Linux development by accident.
Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.
How is that "fair"?
they're not saying it's fair to consumers, they're saying "it's not just apple, microsoft does it too", i.e. that judgement on apple should be made in the context of how its competitors behaved
I think they are saying the fair comparison should be what another 1st party GPU maker supports in their 1st party drivers, not whether or not Windows provides 1st party Vulkan implementation for 3rd party hardware.
Microsoft has the OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan compatibility pack. Major issue is that it's just Mesa compiled to a D3D12 GPU backend, so if you have anything but Snapdragon it's basically useless.
This was more Apple's doing rather than Valve's.
Valve wanted steam to co-exist on the mac in the early days and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I
Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to support games on the machine. Myst was only few that were exclusive to the Mac; that they then ported to PC.
Your timeline doesn't make sense. Steam launched in 2003. Scully was forced out of Apple in 1993.
Most valve games are 32bit macos binaries I assume for powerpc or Intel or something but they flat out refuse to run on modern ox
If they were Intel 64bit binaries they'd still run due to Rosetta 2, however the majority of their games did not get a 64bit upgrade on macOS.
So, your right. But the still holds true, that seed was what was sown not to encourage games for the Mac.
If you watch the YT video they go in to depth that they attempted to port the game and was axed by apple.
Apple runs a gaming subscription service which goes so far as to pay developers for timed exclusivity to Apple platforms. It may be true that in the early days of the Mac, Apple decided games were bad for their brand. This clearly is not true today.
Apple is so obsessed with how their product is marketed and perceived that they all but eliminated gaming on the platform. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been effective, but I'll never understand why people accept that the people who make the computer should decide how you use it.
I wouldn't say 'eliminated gaming', they just have they've put a lot of encouragement into Mac gaming in recent years to the point that they're maintaining Rosetta 2 for game ports (via Crossover/Wine/Proton) even after its broader deprecation.
The main issue IMO is the Apple hardware itself isn't focused on raw performance, it's on energy efficiency and mobility. You'd need a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio at least to have the GPU cores & RAM to play the most recent PC games. And so they just tend to lead with casual games, live service games, and second run AAA games. Technically Apple maintains the world's largest gaming platform (by users & revenue) in iOS.
And plenty of AAA games have been ported to macOS like Cyberpunk 2077, the last few Assassin Creeds (Shadows, Mirage), or even iOS/iPadOS/visionOS like Control & Death Stranding, the recent Assassin's Creeds, Resident Evil 2 & 4 Remakes, RE 7 & 8, Civ 6 & Civ 7, etc.
It's weird, they still try to market it as a machine you can play games on. They make sure a lot of games make it over. It's just never the new cool ones, it's always stuff like a resident evil game from a few years ago or death stranding
It's because the hardware can't really handle the latest and greatest games unless you get the top end hardware. Their GPU innovation is on letting you run an AAA game from 5 years ago on a tablet.
On paper qemu should be able to do this. The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU. Without Apple putting effort into supporting this with e.g. documentation, that's a bit hard. That's also holding back linux support on Apple hardware. But it's a fixable problem that will only get easier as hw gets better and faster over time.
> The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU
Is it, though?
How Hard Can It Possibly Be to just do a software GL renderer that emulates a mid-2000s Radeon, these days?
At what resolution. You're not going to software render 4K120FPS even with 2000s graphics. But you also don't need a software implementation since translating to a host API isn't really any harder than that (and often much easier). And this already exists in Wine.
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/
Wine 11 for Mac will run 32 bit binaries without neeeding 32 bit libraries.
wine?
this is amazing and brings back memories.
Curious though about the bugs. Right at the start, as g-man talks his eyes are missing textures and his mouth doesn't move. Both of those bugs continue, when I get to the part where the guard removes his mask, his lips don't move and the video monitor doesn't change to show the professor.
Is it just a minor oversight or is that something hard to fix?
Booting up the original, some shadows and other graphic details are missing.
Not complaining! Just curious. It made we want to play again!
someone here commented earlier that the animations had to be disabled because they were causing some issues
Here is a link to the blog post since I didn’t see it mentioned
https://www.slqnt.dev/blog/hl2-in-web
Yeah probably better to link to this instead, else everyone clicking will start downloading the big files.
How (why) does that site block reader mode... At least on Firefox Android it offers the reader mode button, but turning it on just redirects back to the page (which is too wide, hence the reader mode attempt)
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.
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:
https://www.idlequest.net/
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!
People have hosted banned book libraries in Minecraft.
https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en
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.
Tricky to block WASM. A lot of useful Websites use for genuinely good usage. Can be for syntax highlighting, chess engine, etc and the same goes for WebGL or WebGPU, they are used for responsive UI in dashboard, for data visualization, for video rendering with effects e.g. blurring a background behind a person thus privacy, etc. Blocking either of those would break a lot of modern useful Websites.
You’re thinking of Facebook, and you can still get that.
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
> 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.
Pretty dishonest to imply that C# is commonly used in Godot. The vast majority of games are Gdscript which exports to browsers perfectly
Unreal Engine 5 does support the web, albeit as a third party implementation (my company)
We spent the last several years building out a WebGPU RHI for UE5, along with tooling to make games load fast using asset streaming, while using less memory. We were recently featured by Gamesbeat.
You can read more about it below or check out our website:
https://gamesbeat.com/simplystream-unlocks-web-compatibility...
https://simplystream.com/
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)
> 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
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.
Unity doesn't use C# for everything. Notably the game engine itself is not C# but C++. C# is essentially just the scripting language.
You're also ignoring the overhead of WASM -> WebGPU -> native graphics API, not to mention how much harder it is to develop and debug that platform than it is a native one.
Unity is just an example. And depending on the game you may actually be doing heavy work in "just the scripting language" instead of the engine. XNA, MonoGame, Love2D, etc. are all frameworks rather than game engines so they're absolutely doing typical engine work in the scripting language, if you need a different example.
> You're also ignoring the overhead of WASM -> WebGPU -> native graphics API
Wine -> DXVK -> native graphics API works great for many people. I can't imagine it having significantly worse performance characteristics, especially when WebGPU is closer to the native graphics API than DirectX on Linux is.
> not to mention how much harder it is to develop and debug that platform than it is a native one.
But why? You still have access to a debugger.
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?).
But why not just render everything 3D? GPUs are more than good enough and it will look more consistent.
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.
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
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.
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)
https://playdoom.ossy.dev/
Cool, so now I can leave my lawnmower where it belongs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521535
That is so wicked cool, I’m going to try this later today!!
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.io
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.
Godot 3.x supports C# on the web because it uses Mono.
Godot 4.x migrated to CoreCLR since Mono is a dead end, but Microsoft insists on .NET being the entrypoint in a WASM build. MS initially promised support for .NET being invoked by something else but dropped the feature, leaving Godot stranded. The current proposal is to make Godot a library (libgodot) invoked by .NET.
I found GDScript to be quite powerful in terms of functionality. I don't have experience in professional game Dev to be aware of the benefits of C# beyond it being the industry standard for Unity.
Single threaded audio is a big concern. I haven't implemented music in my game yet to know if it is a deal breaker.
The main problem that I have run into is shader compilation stutters on the compatibility render. Makes the game basically unplayable. My work around was to spawn certain objects on the main menu out of sight to force compilation. I believe the forward renderer has some pre-compilation.
Of course it's a matter of perspective and I can totally get how one would be happy with GDScript. Tbh, it's hard to beat GDScript when it comes to making small games. It's quite evident that only GDScript has first-class integration into the Editor, C# comes second and all the other serious language bindings come third.
I might state the obvious here, but static typing, null-safety, being able to refactor and such things make C# much much better for bigger games. Slay the Spire 2 has been made with Godot + C# and people have already decompiled and peeked under the hood (for example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpB4-W9L4ec) and imo it shows quite well how certain patterns simply require a more powerful language than GDScript or would at least be very painful and fragile to make in GDScript.
Your workaround for shader stuttering sounds quite hilarious :D I don't mean it's bad. It seems pragmatic in a good sense. But yeah, it's those limitations that pile up when making Godot target the web...
gdscript is missing basic features like interfaces (only abstract classes with no multiple inheritance) or custom value types. spawning scenes from code is tricky and not type safe. asset loading and globals are a mess. the engine is built around using a lot of nodes but nodes are expensive, so you need to drop down to confusing low level server apis if you have performance issues.
the worst part is theres no defined build step so `@tool` scripts run both in the editor and at export time. its easy to accidentally crash the editor or mess up your scene with a bad editor script missing one line of code. and as far as i remember its impossible to undo so remember to save often.
godot is still the best option if you want a open source engine for your game but only because bevy is not production ready yet.
Whew. Crashed before I sunk my day there.
Did it also crash on the part where you exit into the city square? Cause that's where it crashed for me.
Yep.
I just wish Valve could add official macos-arm64 builds of the various hl2 games on Steam :-/
Does anyone know some of the rebinded controls? The main menu doesn't show them and I can't figure out how to reopen the menu during gameplay or any using the bindings that are usually set to the function keys. The page doesn't seem to have any info included like that kind of thing.
Edit 1: crouch is bound to C according to the blog post, but that's the only one mentioned. Edit 2: You can use key_listboundkeys from console. Also can just open the menu with `
Platforms like geforce now are already the superior ways of playing on Mac, as so many games are never ported and old games stop working.
First half life one in browser now we have half life 2! I guess it’s that time again Mr Freeman
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 journey
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 engine
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.
…while inside Jira working on a ticket.
https://github.com/wjkennedy/jira-quake3
Same here - splashed out crazy money upgrading my PC to play HL2.
After that moment I switched to consoles.
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.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
> In a few years todays high end AI models will run on your watch
Although possible with cpu power, I dont think you will ever get enough ram in a watch to run a decent local LLM.
I also dont think the high ram requirements for running them will come down at all.
I wish there were more github deployments of these, when people make these custom websites they are more likely to be blocked
Ah! Just in time for HL3
Along with Team Fortress 3 and Portal 3 ofc. :)
The screens are missing and the lips don't move, but it's pretty close!
for me the eyes are also showing the unwrapped texture of character's own heads, which is extremely unnerving lol
The blog post mentions that the animation system was disabled, because it caused a lot of issues
Input doesn’t work so well on my iPad (lol) but seeing that intro rendered in safari on said ipad, wild. So cool
A few years ago, before I bought a Nintendo for my kid, he was playing Minecraft on an iPad. I tried to pair a Bluetooth controller, and had no luck. I think the OS was too locked down. At the same time, I could connect a Bluetooth controller to my Android phone and play Minecraft with no problem.
In fact, I've said for a long time that I wish I had a nice Android tablet with a Tegra chip that I could both use as regular tablet and as a game system.
The ugliest site in the world that just starts loading and saving files without user interaction.
Give me a play button, let me initiate the install, show me what the hell it is first.
This looks no different than a scam phishing link
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 the content at all.
> Play buttons are scammy
Lol you know nothing about games apparently. I wonder why people like you comment on that which you have no clue
Pretty sure it's just the default Emscripten page. It is bad and most demos don't bother changing it.
What's the biggest bottleneck you hit - GPU compute, memory bandwidth, or network latency for asset streaming? Curious how it compares to native WebGPU.
What a time to be alive. My suggestion: progress bars instead of throbbers during loading data.
Very cool. The download progress bar is broken though, it receives values 0-1 but the max is set to 300.
If they have halflife 2 in the browser, I wonder if this means they can do original CS in the browser too!
Yep! http://play-cs.com
few questions
1) how are games now showing up in browser?
2) how are they porting it, whats the process, can LLM do it?
3) how is it legal? how are they monetizing it ?
1) They were in browsers since 2000s. Then Steve Jobs held a grudge with Adobe and Flash took a major blow. Today, we successfuly reinvented the wheel using "open" technologies - on the client side at least, the authoring tools of Flash are still uncomparable.
2) WebAssembly, compiling the leaked HL2 code. The graphics stack is WebGL.
3) Absolutely illegal, it exists until a cease&desist comes from Valve. We may see it taken down even today. They aren't.
Art assets are the most controversial part about this, using the code is also controversial but can be obfuscated much easier than the art can
If anyone is nostalgic about HL2 and want's revisit it, I highly recommend Black Mesa remake, it's mind blowing in a good way.
While you got the Black Mesa remake confused, HL2 did get a free 20th Anniversay Update a couple years ago: https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th
So it's still worth a revisit :)
Isn't Black Mesa Half-Life 1?
I believe you're correct, and the Half-Life wiki seems to support that: https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Mesa_(game)
Oh, sorry, you are correct. My brain melted a bit in a heat :)
Yes, but with several asterisks.
* Graphics are better (this should not be a surprise)
* Some maps have been made shorter (the underground railway tunnels, if my memory serves)
* The last part of the game (Xen) was pretty much completely overhauled, and in my opinion, improved.
This is from memory so I might be getting one or two details wrong.
What did you like about it?
Very competent rework with good graphics.
What a time to be alive :D
play-cs.com
Is there a repo for this ? Can we mod it ?
What about gaming on a mac?
Looks pretty good
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.
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.
So this port isn't a straight WASM port, you're saying they're running the Windows binary and translating the DirectX8 graphic commands over to WebGL..? Am I understanding correctly?
> 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.
> 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.
browsers aren't common either. Standards, formats, and interfaces are, which is exactly what WASM is and what this demonstrates. Native apps don't need a common operating system or even a common core like nix. They just need to support a common interface, like browsers do.
i need a gary's mod
Cool, but then game hangs in city square.
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.
Tried it on my M4 iPad Pro and was surprised that it works - to a degree. NPCs (Gman and the citizens on the train) seem to be missing eyes and have no mouth animations. FPS was pretty poor too, and it was ass to use the camera on the trackpad.
What I find incredibly impressive is that it just loaded in and seems to work fine on my phone. So cool.
nice game
I loaded this up on my old Intel MacBook half-expecting it to crash instantly, and it actually ran through the train station at a solid clip before falling over in the canals. Anyone know how the shader work compares to the actual Source engine?
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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.
lmao :)
Someone has to look out for the big guys! /s
looks like you forgot to add /s tag to your comment :swh
But what about the people who aren't idiots and can read sarcasm without the /s? I reflexively downvote ever comment I come across with a /s. People aren't idiots until you treat them like one.
But what about people who are in different parts of the world and don't inherently understand your meaning? That is terrible behaviour to downvote the notation.
Text is notorious for not conveying context. Sarcasm can easily be seen as serious by some people, why is why we have the /s notation to make it obvious.
People aren't idiots, they come from different backgrounds, locations, languages, and all use English as a common tongue. Have some consideration and stop thinking you are so big and clever.
The best sarcasm is exactly the one where it could be interpreted as written and people misreading it is part of the fun. If you are going to add sarcasm marks to make sure that absolutely everyone gets what you are intending then whats the point of using sarcasm in the first place instead of clearly writing what you mean?
> The best sarcasm is exactly the one where it could be interpreted as written and people misreading it is part of the fun.
Is it kind of a reverse Poe's Law?
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2 wrongs don't make a right.
Ah yeah the famously equal acts of pirating a game VS promoting illegal unregulated gambling for millions of people (and that's just the tip of the iceberg).
That's why corporations can get away with everything.
You're the only one saying they are equal acts. More than one thing can be acknowledged as a problem at a time.
And something being illegal doesn't make it wrong.
The converse applies to. Just because piracy is illegal, that doesn't make it right.
It's only legal if you are a billion dollar AI company
Is that why I can't access the site?
It works on chromium-based browsers at least
Works in Chrome, Firefox, & Safari from my testing (well done). If there is an site access problem it's probably something on the network side.
legality != morality
In which jurisdiction?
Every signatory of the Berne convention or member of the TRIPS agreement, and most others too.
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Valve already gave Half-Life 2 away for free, and released the source code of the HL1 engine.
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Giving things away for free (at one point) is not the same as making it public domain or relinquishing your (copy)rights. Source available is not the same as open source. Open source code does not mean open source assets/product. I find it weird that this needs to be explained in this community.
> Giving things away for free is not the same as making it public domain or relinquishing your (copy)rights.
Obviously. But it does kill the usual "piracy is bad because companies lose money" argument - especially for a 22-year-old game.
> Source available is not the same as open source.
Obviously. But it does show that Valve is more interested in preserving old genre-defying games for the general public, rather than milking every last cent of revenue out of it.
>Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
God, AI keeps making life better than I could've ever imagined!
It only works like that for the Big Thieves. Us regular folks get screwed over just like before.
GoldSrc (HL1 engine) is very much not open source (or even source available). There's at least one open source remake (which is possibly illegal due to using the SDK) but no official release.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife is the HL1 engine, is it not?
That's just the SDK - which does include the game code but not the engine. Xash3D is the reverse engineered engine alluded to above.
No no, you can't steal anything without consequences, only big corperations who are making slop machines(tm) can.
Turns out "too big to fail" doesn't just apply to reckless financial behavior.
HL2 is not free: https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
It was available for free as part of its 20th anniversary update: https://overclock3d.net/news/software/half-life-2-is-availab...
That was a special promotion with a defined end date. The game is not free. The only legitimate way to obtain it currently is to pay for it. Together with the false claim about HL1 being open source, you're really adding a lot of misinformation to this thread.
> Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
So that makes it okay to pirate and steal games developed by your fellow indie game developers as well?
> Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Try doing the same thing to Nintendo.
Even large companies like Anthropic were not going to risk going to trial and getting bankrupted of over $120B+ in damages in using pirated copyrighted eBooks for training. The best case was a settlement for $1.5B which that is a record settlement in copyright law.
This project seems perfectly congruent with current year industry standards regarding copyright, which are to move fast and lobby for permission later.
That is up for the copyright owner to enforce or not to enforce.
Until they decide, we can't know if it's illegal or not - who knows, this site might have a license.
It's not legal just because the copyright owner doesn't immediately sue you.
If a copyright infringement falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound?
Technically it isn't illegal until the copyright holder decides not to grant (retroactive) permission.
A crime is a crime even before a judge rules over it. Sure, innocent until proven guilty, but most people know when they're doing something wrong and then don't do it.
Of course, this is a lot more grey area for copyright violations etc because it's a civil matter.
> innocent until proven guilty
Pithy but untrue. The verbose-but-correct statement is about procedural prerequisites: Government officials are forbidden to imprison or fine you until your guilt is proved, to an impartial and properly-instructed jury in a fair trial, beyond a reasonable doubt. (The Scots have the better formulation for criminal cases: Guilty, or not proved.)
Illustration: OJ Simpson was found not guilty [sic] in his criminal trial. So he couldn't be imprisoned. But then a different jury found — under the lower, preponderance of the evidence standard — that Simpson did indeed murder his ex-wife and the other guy. The latter case was the civil action for wrongful death, brought by the survivors of his victims. The survivors won a $33.5M verdict. Simpson's assets were seized, and sold at a court-ordered auction, to pay the judgment — including his Heisman Trophy.
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.
> "Innocent until proven guilty" concerns whether someone did a crime
See my upthread comment: "Innocent until proven guilty" is catchy but false.
Only our legal institutions and the frameworks they create can decide if any specific act is a crime.
It's quite dangerous to make unsubstantiated comments and assumptions on US copyright law without the proper research.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
So just say you do not know.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
> just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent
I don't think the parent comment is claiming it's legal, other than the (unlikely) chance that this is licensed, just that it's up to Valve to enforce and not really our concern. A lot of cool things (like the similar https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.
> we can't know if it's illegal or not
I think we can.
We can guess this is unlicensed, and likely be right, but whether it gets taken down is up to Valve.
And I think we don't care.
> Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
Because projects like this are free publicity and don't actually compete with the product sold on Steam.