I love how people like to make browser versions of everything. From chat apps to email clients to games. But they all end up consuming 10x the memory but are still 10x slower than their native counterparts !
Seems a bit unfair to only acknowledge one side of the trade-offs. Obviously native apps win the perf side.
How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link? Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all.
I think browser ports are the only hope that old games have at coming back. The other month I played Nox's quest mode with my friend on a browser emscripten port (plus a lot of custom code / networking to get it online). And it's a game I thought I'd never get to play again. Gog.com sells Nox for Windows but of course the servers are long offline.
The adolescent glee over how much worse browser applications run really misses the big picture.
> How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link? Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all.
This is actually one of the major selling points for Cloud Gaming. Although it still has a lot of issues to be adressed before getting into the mainstream, this is exactly what it promises. Just sending your friends an invite link and get them to sign up is a much more pleasant experience than downloading 100+GBs of game files before being able to join the session.
I also enjoy seing browser implementations of popular games. My favorite recent example is the classic version of Minecraft running in the browser [0]. The browser is obviously a much more restrictive environment than a native app, but I can still imagine plenty of useful examples for performant 3D graphics in a browser. After all, Games are often just used as a showcase for the capabilities of new Apis and performance improvements.
I always thought the cloud gamming is really just a way to move gammers to "subscriptions" instead of one time purchases, in the end milking more money and taking more control from them just like Adobe did with their creative products.
Microsoft has been successfully charging subscriptions to millions of players every year without needing to run games in the cloud. Cloud gaming is a play at capturing revenue from people who aren't willing to shell out $300+ for hardware and $60 for every AAA title they want to play.
But regardless of this particular game, it is not a valid complaint. It is like complaining your phone or your toaster cannot run a given game because it was never designed for them.
You know no-one is forcing you to play CS in your browser, right? Why is it so offensive to you that this exists and someone else is finding joy in playing it? Why does HN love to rag on web technologies so much?
I simply stated that downloading dozens of gigabytes from a link is far from ideal. You also lose performance, features, community, and everything a place like Steam gives you.
> Why does HN love to rag on web technologies so much?
HN is quite pro-web and there are dozens of startups based on the web.
Nevertheless, my counter is: why does "the web" try to recreate existing technologies and operating systems?
> Nevertheless, my counter is: why does "the web" try to recreate existing technologies and operating systems?
Why not? Why is it so offensive to you? You know you can just ignore it and move on, right? You don't have to be an asshole and shit on everything you see.
I mean, before Steam this was basically the state of gaming. No community, limited features, spotty performance. This is just teething issues. There is no reason a platform like Stadia can't work in the future as these things get better.
And, in terms of downloading gigs from afar, you're already doing that, but instead of being able to play games while downloading you have to wait to download 60gb of COD updates, consume your entire PS4 drive with a single game. And while that is happening, you're just sitting there not using your PS4 because opening another application pauses the download.
We are starting to see more cross platform support for games between PS4, XBO, and PC. But older games won't ever support cross platform between Windows, OSX, and *Nix. A browser port could easily change that.
> Why does "the web" try to recreate existing technologies and operating systems?
It's the same trend we've had since basically the dawn of computers. We move things into deeper abstraction layers. Why is this an issue in your opinion? Isn't more options better? Isn't ideal to adapt old concepts to new implementations? At the very least does it not provide potential educational value?
> I mean, before Steam this was basically the state of gaming. No community, limited features, spotty performance.
That makes no sense. Before Steam there were many gaming online communities, all games were native and were marvels of technology for the time, etc.
> There is no reason a platform like Stadia can't work in the future as these things get better.
Stadia does not run games on web tech. Quite the opposite. They are native Linux Vulkan binaries.
> you're already doing that
There is a big difference between downloading a game once vs every time.
If you mention offline web storage, that is exactly the same solution as Steam and others do. A good example of the web reinventing the wheel.
> consume your entire PS4 drive with a single game
Not the case with a PC with terabytes of space.
> you're just sitting there not using your PS4
Not the case with Steam/PC.
> We are starting to see more cross platform support for games between PS4, XBO, and PC. But older games won't ever support cross platform between Windows, OSX, and Nix.
That has nothing to do with technology. It is a matter of licensing, finances and support.
The overwhelming majority of games use engines which target all platforms, from PC to mobile to console.
> A browser port could easily change that.
No, because it has nothing to do with technical issues.
> Why is this an issue in your opinion?
I have never claimed it is an issue.
> Isn't ideal to adapt old concepts to new implementations?
A new implementation does not imply a better implementation.
The average non-technical person isn't installing unsigned software on Mac or Windows, and the average person isn't using Linux at all so it's not worth considering in this conversation.
For all intents and purposes, approved windows applications and mac app store apps are what they get.
I don't think that lowering friction is a great thing. A certain amount of easy-to-overcome exclusiveness helps keep a community vibrant.
When I was a kid I heard about a group of hippies that would have parties deep into the desert, far from roads or civilization. They had a "list", and if you were on it you'd get invited to the parties. Long story short, I figured out how to get on the list and one of the coolest things about those parties was how much effort everyone who attended went through to get there, both in however they managed to get invited and how much of a potential ordeal the journey was just to show up. The friends I made there put me on my current life course and now I'm surrounded by great people and a good tribe, which is really hard to find once you finish university. All because I put in the effort to get on the list and attend.
Sure, not making things super easy creates slightly less inclusive communities and they are definitely smaller, but they're longer lasting, have some shared plight to bond around, and are generally of much higher quality. Allowing any old yokel easy access kills community because there are too many tourists
This is such a joke. Elitist, even. Technology-sourced friction is not a great thing. Software that is hard to run does not improve the act of running it. It just prevents others from experiencing the same things you enjoy.
Are you really suggesting that you bond with fellow gamers because of how hard setting up the game was?
Yes. And in the scene I am describing we are being overrun with tourists because everybody is just so damn inclusive now. There's nothing wrong with elitism; it keeps things hardcore and gives newcomers something to strive for.
Mouse tracking is clearly broken on Firefox here. The input lag is insance. I wouldn't link this to any of my friends with the intention of getting them to play Counter Strike with me.
Shame, I just played a few rounds in Firefox on a Mac without any mouse tracking or input lag issues and had a blast! Is it possible that you have some Firefox Add-ons installed that are messing with it?
The subreddit has a small community of people playing. iirc there's a community server you can point the Gog.com binary to: http://old.reddit.com/r/nox. (The Gog.com binary actually runs on macOS if you're pre-Catalina as it's 32bit, they just removed the indication since everyone is on Catalina now)
The browser "port" is here: https://playnox.xyz/ (200mb) -- Whether online play is available or not can be hit or miss. The single player campaign does work as well -- worth it for insta-nostalgia.
I say "port" in quotes because it's not just a matter of `cat nox.exe | emscripten > nox.js` of course. The creator posts in the subreddit / the nox community forums and has some really interesting technical comments where he explains some of the challenges.
People who can pull off something like this (talk about cross-cutting engineering skills) really blow me away.
We used to hold game nights at my previous company and we would all play quake on the browser together. No installing, no sharing files, nothing. Just click the link on Slack and you're in. Nothing beats that.
This is a flippant useless negative comment on someone's cool effort. Looking at your other comments, and at your blog - everything is negative. "This sucks, this is crap, I would never use this". What's with all the negativity? Just give creating comments and posts about stuff you like a try. The internet is not short of critics to make useless negative comments.
Yeah, enumerating why something sucks is trivial. Anyone can do that about anything. Yet for some reason it's tempting to do it. Maybe because it makes us feel like a critic?
For some reason it takes more effort to see the positives in something or someone, even ourselves.
It's often a good practice to stop and think of the positives of something. Maybe it's not so obvious. Why did someone decide to build it this way? They probably are well aware of the downsides (after all, they're the one who built it) yet they saw some upsides. They must have thought the upsides outweighed the downsides. What were they? The harder that question is to answer, I think the more useful the practice is.
Internet (and HN) discourse would be a lot better if we did more of that.
I know it's a challenge for me -- it's really easy to get stuck in a negative thought loop, especially while spending so much time on social media (incl Twitter, Reddit, and HN) where we like to award ourselves points for being critical.
This was actually explored in this Cracked article [0] which I heard about on the Cracked Podcast. Basically, being cynical and negative is one of the easiest ways of appearing smart because you don't need to back up any of your assertions and people are less likely to be called out for shitting on something.
I don't see how being negative allow one to not back anything, I can say something sucks, but I'd have to explain why. And people will get called for shitting on something, see the GP comment.
I'd even say you're less likely to be called out for being negative without giving an explanation than being positive without giving an explanation.
Though it's usually easier to explain why something sucks than why something is great, since a negative explanation has only to find which part don't work, rather than explaining why something is globally good.
This isn't about being negative or critical. It's about being negative all the time. It's about labelling yourself as cynical and making all of your schtick be about that negativity.
I see plenty of well-thought out criticism on hacker news and reddit. I see excellent deconstructions and refutations which show excellent balance and are clearly the work of a lot of thought and rumination. This isn't about those posts.
The 'cynical is an easy way to appear smart' comment will apply most to daily conversation and low-effort drive-by comments on forums. In an everyday example, think about how people will make a joke or comment about how they dislike certain bands or pieces of technology. Do they always follow up with a bullet pointed list of what it is that they found disagreeable? No. I mean, sometimes, but if I were to take a clicker with me throughout my day and count every time someone made a casual negative comment, it would be higher than those presented with backing evidence, justification or even explanation. So to counter this comment:
>I don't see how being negative allow one to not back anything, I can say something sucks, but I'd have to explain why.
I disagree. You absolutely don't have to say why something sucks and most people don't most of the time.
But this is ok, though, because people are mostly just expressing their opinion. There may be some signalling that you have a better taste in music or that you have a more refined taste in technology, but most people won't even consciously register that that is the intent that you are trying to signal. So I'd say that this covers this:
>I'd even say you're less likely to be called out for being negative without giving an explanation than being positive without giving an explanation.
I will agree with you if the comment is negative and controversial but most of the time people are negative, it passes most people's internal 'controversiality test', it doesn't get challenged and nothing further happens.
>And people will get called for shitting on something, see the GP comment.
They will. Sometimes. However, we're not talking here about nobody ever being called out for being overly negative. We're talking about how overall it is easier to appear to be coming from a place of authority by taking a negative stand point.
Hacker News is rife with this. A new technology is posted and the first things that will be commented will be picking holes in it, finding obvious flaws, decrying or otherwise.
Statistically, this would seem to be fine and you're likely to be on the winning side of history most of the time. New stuff is more likely to be either undeveloped or unstable, ignore or duplicate work or be so forward looking that it isn't viable in the near term. However, this then also becomes the intellectually lazy stance to take. 'This is probably going to be bad, so let's find all the flaws first and then we can call it a day'. You will see many comments which will include lots of technical flaws without themselves saying what experience their criticism is based on. And the cost would appear to be minor: some things that become good and viable ideas eventually get shot down, but so what? If they become good then that person can just change their mind and no harm no foul.
Overall, this means that the 'cynical' mindset appears to be a stable one, one that means that you're right more often than you're wrong and one that means that you can appear to be talking from a position of authority without actually having to back that up.
So, sure, I see what you mean to an extent, but I think your point grossly misses the point of what my post (and indeed the two parents) were really getting at.
I agree with you on one level-- I think people on HN are generally overly critical of projects like this which are clearly huge accomplishments and the culmination of tons of effort...
But on the flip side, I think it's plenty valid to look at projects like this as case studies into why modern web tooling isn't up to the standards of the tooling of 20 years ago (on much less performant hardware no less). Even within the browser, decades old flash games run circles around their JS contemporaries.
> In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
> Anton Ego
Maybe GP will learn this someday, but based on their replies to you, that day is not today.
Meanwhile, they're raking in the upvotes thanks to their cyniscim, so why change their approach?
I am an avid gamer who players a couple of hours of Apex Legends and Call of Duty Modern Warfare everyday. And I've been info FPS gaming for 2 decades now.
To play a game released a couple of decades ago and see it take up almost the same amount of resources as the games I mentioned earlier gave me a chuckle.
I commend the developer for his effort though. To make a game like that run on browsers is a mighty impressive effort and it is Uber cool. I don't dispute that even for a second.
Are you actually saying you need an Apex Legends-capable machine to play Counter Strike on the browser? You can probably play this with an Intel integrated card from 10 years ago.
GP's comment is a short and non-insightful comment, this usually gets downvoted but for some reason it made it in this thread. I usually call this "driveby feedback" at work.
More like a portable CS that can be placed in the documents directory and run from there. I remember my son's cousins installing software while not as admin on my Windows PC by installing in the documents directory. CS, AOL Chat, etc.
A good way to get malware as well. I could never trust those cracked versions. One cracked version made CS 1.6 with Navy Seals looking for bin Laden, which I thought was fun.
The first two are trivially solved by portable applications (AppDirs, Application Bundles, AppImage, etc.). Platform independence is only kinda true, as many of these things don't actually function correctly on anything but Chrome, so they effectively target just one platform.
Those are all very minors inconveniences. Installation took a few clicks, disk space is negligible for that category of apps (and if it isn’t re-downloading on each access is a more pressing issue). Only the platform thing matters, yet the exemple you give isn’t convincing given it’s super low market share.
then there are apps like photopea.com. feature parity with Photoshop, but starts immediately, consumes virtually no memory, requires no special permissions, runs on virtually any os. compare that to the adobe app which loads half a dozen services, takes about a minute to load, wont run on linux, etc...
Well since we now have 10x the memory and 10x the compute we are able to do this.
Also, you don't need no stinkin App Store, zero time for installation. The only next step would be to have everything open source I think these are good tradeoffs. I rather have Freedom than performance and more and more tech users are doing this.
It works well on my laptop without installing a darn thing. Why do I care if it's 10x the memory if I have that memory to use? Graphics are good enough. Gameplay is like I remember it 20 years ago (was it that long?!?!). I think this is pretty amazing.
think the biggest issue with browser apps is proper asset management. what you see most of the times is a huge payload of assets getting loaded at the start. I would like to see some kind of streaming service for assets. specially with textures that would be really neat.
The hard part there isn't a browser vs native thing (native apps also generally ship with all of the assets in a front-loaded client) but abstracting your rendering pipeline to handle streaming or incremental LoD over the network.
It's more of challenge of taking the time to add that level of polish.
Kind of like the rare native game, like League of Legends, that will let you play before the entire client is finished downloading. Being a native app didn't give Riot Games that for free, they had to specifically build it for their game. Even in the native game market, it's AAA-level polish for a small fraction of games.
I would actually love to see an old browser (e.g. IE 6) purely implemented in JavaScript to run inside a browser, without using the browser's DOM rendering capabilities (the web page should be rendered by the JS code on a <canvas> element, input events should be correctly handled, and of course a JS engine also has to be implemented).
This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost.
But we could have just stopped at assembler with that insight. I mean all the rest is just slower, and less efficient.
> This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost.
This is not even necessarily true. There are zero cost abstractions. Compilers can generate better assembly code than the overwhelming majority of developers.
Your point? I literally just clicked on a link, downloaded a few assets and was into an online FPS. Virtually any modern computer in the world no matter what OS/browser should be able to do the same.
But I guess for someone like you it has to be written in assembly so it's 100% efficient, even though you take 100x more to attempt to get it working than your counterpart.. and you never actually finish.
