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Half-Life 2 in a Browser
- entropyneur 3mo agoWhew. Crashed before I sunk my day there.
- butlike 3mo agoDid it also crash on the part where you exit into the city square? Cause that's where it crashed for me.
- entropyneur 3mo agoYep.
- AzzyHN 3mo ago[flagged]
- londons_explore 3mo agoThat 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.
- KeplerBoy 3mo agoIt's not legal just because the copyright owner doesn't immediately sue you.
- simondotau 3mo agoIf a copyright infringement falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound?
- account42 3mo agoTechnically it isn't illegal until the copyright holder decides not to grant (retroactive) permission.
- rvz 3mo agoIt'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/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
- Ukv 3mo ago> 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/ https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.
- account42 3mo ago> 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.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoA 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.
- __alexs 3mo agoWhat happened to innocent until proven guilty?
- zygentoma 3mo ago"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.
- dctoedt 3mo ago> 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.
- crote 3mo agoValve 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.
- dminik 3mo agoGoldSrc (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.
- flordaman 3mo agoNo no, you can't steal anything without consequences, only big corperations who are making slop machines(tm) can.
- account42 3mo agoTurns out "too big to fail" doesn't just apply to reckless financial behavior.
- nba456_ 3mo ago>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!
- account42 3mo agoThis project seems perfectly congruent with current year industry standards regarding copyright, which are to move fast and lobby for permission later.
- LandenLove 3mo agoAs 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
- roflcopter69 3mo agoIsn'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.
- LandenLove 3mo agoI 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.
- roflcopter69 3mo agoOf 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 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...
- ironhaven 3mo agoFirst half life one in browser now we have half life 2! I guess it’s that time again Mr Freeman
- rvz 3mo ago[flagged]
- sudo_cowsay 3mo agoIs that why I can't access the site?
- albertgoeswoof 3mo agoYup. 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.
- m00dy 3mo agolooks like you forgot to add /s tag to your comment :swh
- fragmede 3mo agoBut 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.
- alt227 3mo agoBut 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.
- modeless 3mo agoAnd Quake 3: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ And Unreal Tournament: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut There's also https://noclip.website/ 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).
- sho_hn 3mo agoAnd Tomb Raider https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu 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.
- plastic-enjoyer 3mo agoWhat a time to be alive
- rvnx 3mo agoWhat 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)
- Beijinger 3mo agoplay-cs.com
- bozdemir 3mo agoWhat a time to be alive :D
- gambiting 3mo agoWhat I find incredibly impressive is that it just loaded in and seems to work fine on my phone. So cool.
- typon 3mo agoI 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
- comprev 3mo agoSame here - splashed out crazy money upgrading my PC to play HL2. After that moment I switched to consoles.
- iso1631 3mo agoIn 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 https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- alt227 3mo ago> 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.
- noufalibrahim 3mo agoI 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.
- itomato 3mo ago…while inside Jira working on a ticket. https://github.com/wjkennedy/jira-quake3 https://github.com/wjkennedy/jira-quake3
- pelagicAustral 3mo agoAh! Just in time for HL3
- el_peaton 3mo agoAlong with Team Fortress 3 and Portal 3 ofc. :)
- schappim 3mo agoIf they have halflife 2 in the browser, I wonder if this means they can do original CS in the browser too!
- panza 3mo agoYep! http://play-cs.com http://play-cs.com
- vladar107 3mo agoWhat's the biggest bottleneck you hit - GPU compute, memory bandwidth, or network latency for asset streaming? Curious how it compares to native WebGPU.
- 0x0 3mo agoI just wish Valve could add official macos-arm64 builds of the various hl2 games on Steam :-/
- Hamuko 3mo agoTried 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.
- mrtksn 3mo agoInteresting, 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.
- jillesvangurp 3mo agoOn 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.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago> 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?
- account42 3mo agoAt 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.
- Klonoar 3mo agoI admit that Valve’s approach to Steam on macOS has never made sense to me.
- doublerabbit 3mo agoThis 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 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.
- globular-toast 3mo agoI'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.
- memoryuns4f3fff 3mo agoHere is a link to the blog post since I didn’t see it mentioned https://www.slqnt.dev/blog/hl2-in-web https://www.slqnt.dev/blog/hl2-in-web
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoYeah probably better to link to this instead, else everyone clicking will start downloading the big files.
- Mossy9 3mo agoHow (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)
- antalis 3mo agoThe screens are missing and the lips don't move, but it's pretty close!
- diimdeep 3mo agoCool, but then game hangs in city square.
- GL26 3mo agoIs there a repo for this ? Can we mod it ?
- NovaCode37 3mo agoLooks pretty good
- utopiah 3mo agoThat'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.
- account42 3mo agoSounds 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.
- itomato 3mo agoYou’re thinking of Facebook, and you can still get that.
- utopiah 3mo agoTricky 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.
- brynnbee 3mo agoI 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/ 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!
- othmanosx 3mo agoWhat about gaming on a mac?
- fuzzy2 3mo agoVery cool. The download progress bar is broken though, it receives values 0-1 but the max is set to 300.
- kevinten10 3mo ago[flagged]
- acosmism 3mo agoi need a gary's mod
- Artoooooor 3mo agoWhat a time to be alive. My suggestion: progress bars instead of throbbers during loading data.
- naikrovek 3mo agoHow 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.
- DANmode 3mo ago> 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.
- hwillis 3mo agobrowsers 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.
- 3mo ago
- denkmoon 3mo agoInput doesn’t work so well on my iPad (lol) but seeing that intro rendered in safari on said ipad, wild. So cool
- hwc 3mo agoA 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.
- denkmoon 3mo agoNvidia used to have exactly that tablet, though it’s quite old now. I ended up with 2 even through a battery recall program where you were supposed to just throw out the recalled unit. Maybe a little ahead of its time, but it was awesome for retroarch. Had HDMI out so you could use it as a console. Fun times.
- postatic 3mo agoCool! 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/ https://playdoom.ossy.dev/
- jessinra98 3mo agoI 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?
- hwc 3mo agoWith 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?"
- nnevatie 3mo agoBecause you'd be missing the market and monetization layer that Steam so conveniently provides.
- nickpeterson 3mo agoI’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?).
- Rohansi 3mo agoBut why not just render everything 3D? GPUs are more than good enough and it will look more consistent.
- dandersch 3mo agoTechnical 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
- astlouis44 3mo ago
- mynameajeff 3mo agoDoes 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 `
- Yizahi 3mo agoIf anyone is nostalgic about HL2 and want's revisit it, I highly recommend Black Mesa remake, it's mind blowing in a good way.
- wilkystyle 3mo agoWhat did you like about it?
- Yizahi 3mo agoVery competent rework with good graphics.
- omni 3mo agoIsn't Black Mesa Half-Life 1?
- jjice 3mo agoI believe you're correct, and the Half-Life wiki seems to support that: https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Mesa_(game) https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Mesa_(game)
- otikik 3mo agoYes, 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.
- Yizahi 3mo agoOh, sorry, you are correct. My brain melted a bit in a heat :)
- kllrnohj 3mo agoWhile 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 https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th So it's still worth a revisit :)
- themonsu 3mo agoPlatforms like geforce now are already the superior ways of playing on Mac, as so many games are never ported and old games stop working.
- csecskolbasz 3mo ago[flagged]
- csecskolbasz 3mo ago[flagged]
- mclau153 3mo agoI wish there were more github deployments of these, when people make these custom websites they are more likely to be blocked
- paganartifact 3mo ago[dead]
- Rohansi 3mo agoPretty sure it's just the default Emscripten page. It is bad and most demos don't bother changing it.
- taintlord223 3mo ago[dead]
- zamadatix 3mo agoIt 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.
- taintlord223 3mo ago[dead]
- playorizaya 3mo ago[flagged]
- lucas_davis 3mo agonice game
- zuzululu 3mo agofew 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 ?
- mclau153 3mo agoArt assets are the most controversial part about this, using the code is also controversial but can be obfuscated much easier than the art can
- AndriyKunitsyn 3mo ago1) 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.
- socalgal2 3mo agothis 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!
- efilife 3mo agosomeone here commented earlier that the animations had to be disabled because they were causing some issues
- LouisvilleGeek 3mo agoCan we get Counter Strike? :)
- mrtuna 3mo agoWHY ARE THEIR EYES MADE OF THEIR FACES :(
- k_54th15h 3mo agothis reminds me of vice city running on the browser.
- nhgeywhjt 3mo agopirno
- nhgeywhjt 3mo agosjhgfdgrfhgkjsfkkjknjuhcfjyuhufiodyjykd