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Comment by ferongr | Hacker News Reader

Is it? I mean, it's nice that it can be played "in the browser" but from a graphics fidelity perspective (and artistic direction, but that's beside the point) it's not impressive. It looks like 6-7 year old game graphics, without the interactivity and complexity.

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Well, i think the clouds are procedural and you get soft edges in the water. But yeah, i like the scene but the performance is abysmal (45 FPS on "Ultra" on my GTX980 for a scene that generally looks emptier and more repeat-y than what you see when you exit Half-Life 2's metro station).

I'm not sure if it is because of WebGL 2, Firefox, the PlayCanvas engine or just this demo though. But unless WebGL 2 imposes big performance penalties, i doubt this is representative of what could be done.

I don't know why you were downvoted. This demo doesn't feel more impressive than the 13 year old Half Life 2, let alone the 10 year old Crysis. Both interactive games rather than a tech demo.

It's a combination of problems but IMHO mostly due to things like: lack of tooling, immaturity of graphics libraries and especially immaturity of WebGL2 in those libraries, and modelling/art direction.

The technology is pretty capable but the ecosystem around it pales in comparison to the platforms driving many of today's AAA and indie games.

Unity and Unreal both provide limited exporting to WebGL.

And what's even worse, so many drivers have issues when compiling shaders that were writen maliciously (or even regular ones), that I'd say we'll see security problems with this really soon, the same we saw them when web fonts started to pop in and code that dealt with fonts simply wasn't written with security in mind

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