This project seems perfectly congruent with current year industry standards regarding copyright, which are to move fast and lobby for permission later.
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.
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 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 was just going to say the same thing. I couldn't afford the rigs needed to run any of these games and never really played them. Now, it's running inside a browser on a laptop.
I remember when the game files got hacked before release, and you could run around in half completed maps and small area snippets. I spent hours running around in awe of the new physics engine
What's the biggest bottleneck you hit - GPU compute, memory bandwidth, or network latency for asset streaming? Curious how it compares to native WebGPU.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 80.5 ms ] threadAnd 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).
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.
https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/
https://retail.classicuo.org/
BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
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
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.
https://www.slqnt.dev/blog/hl2-in-web
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.
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!
https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/en