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These are mostly business issues. If the business problems would be solved, the games would be built, despite any technical limitations of the web platform (which are not much different than limitations on low-end Android mobile devices).

Nobody has figured out so far how to make money with high quality games on the "open web" to get the same return on investment like simple ad-driven 2D games running on closed platforms like Facebook which can technically be cobbled together by 3 dudes in their mom's basemement (exaggerating a bit here of course).

E.g. no matter how you approach it, the Citadel demo wouldn't have led to a web game that would make the same profit relative to the development cost like a simple ad-driven Tetris style game.




No they aren't, at least low end Android devices support GL ES 3.2 and have proper debugging tools.

After a decade Web 3D keeps having spectorJS as the only alternative.

Naturally there are also some masochists that enjoy debugging the browser 3D stack on RenderDoc, while trying to figure out what belongs to their application.


If you use WASM+WebGL, you'd typically debug a native build outside the browser.

According to here GLES3.2 support on Android is currently sitting at 80%, while with GLES3.0 you would reach about 95%, and with GLES2 100%.

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards#OpenGL

If I would try to ship a native app on Android I would still at least try to only use GLES3.0 features to get that extra 15%.

You enthusiastic charactization of Android debugging tools isn't exactly how I would describe the situation ;)


A kludge to work around lack of tooling for the past decade, and when doing that, no need to WASM anyway.

Even if we consider GL ES 3.0, native comes out winning, due to missing features on WebGL 2.0.

Not only has Android the GPU debugger from Google, that beats anything available for Web, each mobile GPU vendor has their own set of graphical debuggers.




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