Hacker News

Everyone posting links made me want to find HL1 in browser: https://x8bitrain.github.io/webXash/

There's also Ultima Online in the browser (sanctioned by the official servers). I'm one of the maintainers.

https://retail.classicuo.org/

That was fun thank you, haven't played quake 3 in awhile, so many memory neurons firing!

GTA vice city https://quenq.com/apps/vice-city/

And Duke Nukem 3D made by my friend Gawen: https://gawen.me/webduke

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/

And Diablo: https://devilutionx.app

Also The Simpsons Hit & Run! https://shar-wasm.cjoseph.workers.dev/

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.

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

Also xonotic! https://www.xonotic.gg/

And CS: https://play-cs.com

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.

What a time to be alive

> And Quake 3 There is QuakeJS as well.

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.

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

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 admit that Valve’s approach to Steam on macOS has never made sense to me.

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.

MacOS removing 32bit support was a massive pain. A bunch of Ambrosia Software games no longer work too (e.g. Escape Velocity Nova, Apeiron).

Wine 11 for Mac will run 32 bit binaries without neeeding 32 bit libraries.

wine?

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)

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 running 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.

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!!

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

The fact the site died after being posted here might be an indication why :-P.

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?).

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)

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.

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.

Did it also crash on the part where you exit into the city square? Cause that's where it crashed for me.

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.

Pretty sure it's just the default Emscripten page. It is bad and most demos don't bother changing it.

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.

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

Along with Team Fortress 3 and Portal 3 ofc. :)

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.

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

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?

What did you like about it?

Yep! http://play-cs.com

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

[flagged]

It's only legal if you are a billion dollar AI company

Is that why I can't access the site?

legality != morality

In which jurisdiction?