Devilution – A web port of the original Diablo game | Hacker News Reader

Devilution – A web port of the original Diablo game

diablo.rivsoft.net

297 pointstilt125 comments

What's also amazing is how someone ported Nox to the browser. Similar but more arena-style game (by Westwood) that was unfortunately overshadowed by Diablo at the time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nox/comments/bkvc0s/nox_in_a_browse...

https://playnox.xyz/

Even multiplayer works. Insane amount of work.

I highly recommend at least trying the campaign (not the "Quest" mode). It's like a faster Diablo.

It's under active development, and sometimes the initial download can't complete on my crappy connection.

Nox! What a treasure. One of my personal favorites. Its so similar to many other dungeon crawlers but somehow strikingly unique and unreasonably fun.

the abilityo reverse most spells was fun. my favorite was teleporting an enemy to my teleport marker instead of myself. o courses my marker was in a lava lake...

I remember installing Nox and finishing it in one go

Single player was only the beginning (Although they did have Nox Quest later).

That was one of the best online battle-arena style games I have ever played even to this day. The ladder system was awesome. Games were fast paced, you could pop in and out as you pleased

Yes! The multiplayer was the best part imo.

When I found the web port, I had to immediately host my own multiplayer games so I could reminisce on the maps that have only been memories for 15+ years. Some of the best gaming of my childhood happened on that mini-mine deathmatch map and those larger CTF maps.

I loved how different the classes were. CTF maps were all sorts of chaos, all these little battles happening all over the place. Stone fists falling from the sky, warriors randomly charging through choke points, wizards spawning walls and annoying teleportation traps, the devious chuckle of an ember demon, the foreboding gong-chimes of Force of Nature spam, and the satisfaction of a Death Ray one-shot.

I was going to mention this if nobody else had - really amazing job done by the most prolific hacker of the Nox community. He also set up proxy servers so users playing through the web version using WebRTC could join servers hosted by non-web players.

I spent so many hours playing WW's Nox. Was able to assist the dev team with bugs from time to time. Enjoyed the release of Nox Quest. I miss Westwood.

Hello My Friend, Stay awhile and Listen :D

But the first question that springs to my mind when I was reading the web page, what happened to Shareware? 30 days trial.

We used to have games that we could play a little to decide whether we want to buy it. Now it is like a money bet hoping for the best.

I haven't been gaming for a while now, but on my Xbox 360 I could download a demo, test the game for a bit and then decide to buy it or not. I have used that quite a lot.

Demos are still common; e.g. Steam has around ~3000.

If it's 3000 on all the Steam games (~ 30k), I'd say that they are not common. And they are also very uncommon for big release.

Perhaps they just got replaced by youtube "let's plays"?

They got replaced by videos of the games in action (as opposed to the specific "let's play" genre). The screenshots + description + a video + reviews informs me about most games on STEAM.

A random game I have up in my queue on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1101660/Cooking_Trip_Back...

Do you really need a demo?

Something like this, I'd guess: https://youtu.be/7QM6LoaqEnY

It's not the same thing, but you can buy a game from steam and return it if you didn't like it. They accept it without questions if you return it in like 7 days after purchase.

If you do it too much they'll block refunds on your account though. It's not intended as a demo of the software.

You can count the 2 hour no questions asked refund policy of Steam as demos, I guess.

Yes, I suspect that plays a part at least within the context of Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds

Do you how bad it was if you rented a bad game from blockbuster? The cover looked sweet but the game was terrible. God forbid you actually bought a cool looking game from Toys R’ Us only to find out it was trash.

Today is a much better time. I can go to YouTube or other places to actually see gameplay before I buy. I used to have to buy GamePro and read to figure things out.

Maybe it's a cultural shift, that is, people can get information about a game - reviews, etc - a lot more and easier than back then when you depended on just the right issue of gaming magazines. Alternatively, the best you had was looking at the back of a game's box to get the gist of it.

But with shareware you often went in blind, especially once CD-ROMs became a thing (attached to magazines) with dozens if not hundreds of shareware games and applications. The culture was one of browsing and trying stuff out.

Nowadays it's more about being able to build up hype and brand / name awareness over time, with peak moments being e.g. the E3 conference. More recent even is streaming on Twitch and let's plays on youtube, allowing people to see the game before buying it themselves. And of course there's free-to-play or low cost games with in game purchases and/or live services.

I don't find reviews to be a substitute for demos; there's always a strong element of "if you like games like this then..."

I pretty much only buy Steam games on sale now, not (just) because I'm a skinflint, but because I've learned the expensive way that I'll uninstall most games within half an hour or so or starting them. Even well-reviewed ones. Even ones that won Game Of The Year.

Are you sure you like video games?

Well, I've been playing them for about 35 years now, so pretty sure.

Of course, obvious side-effects of advanced fogeydom include having less free time, being harder to impress with novelty, and losing the reflexes needed for some genres.

"Liking video games" is like "liking books". Typically people prefer certain kinds of games or books, and may find any particular example enjoyable or not.

Nobody questions whether I "like books" when I say The Lost World was a lackluster sequel to Jurassic Park, right? Because there is no expectation that somebody who enjoyed one particular book should like every book, even within the same genre or franchise.

I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.

Or possibly, he knows his taste very well and is extremely selective. Some people may only be willing to invest serious time into games that fit their tastes close-to-perfectly.

I wager you don't like most critically acclaimed books, but that certainly doesn't mean you dislike books. Rather, it's just a reflection of the fact that there is such wide variety of books that anybody is unlikely to like most of them.

Sure, but I like most of the critically acclaimed books that I buy, which is more analogous to mrec's comment.

This seems like a loaded question -- do you mean to imply that to "like video games" you must like "all video games" including inherently broken and ones that promise the world in tech demo/e3 while delivering garbage on release date?

Just because one "likes books" does not mean that they should be forced to suffer gleefully through turds like Dr. Phil's "Self Matters".

As above, I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning most games he buys, including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.

I don't return them (except in cases of technical brokenness or blatant false advertising), I just stop playing them.

And I don't quite understand why "reviews not covering the aspects of a game which determine my enjoyment of it" means I don't know my own taste.

Tons of reviews are bought and paid for by the games' publishers.

We see things like "10/10" in magazines for mediocre AAA games.

I really only trust user-generated reviews from Steam and GoG to be impartial. Console gaming is a crapshoot.

Dunkey presented a fairly well-argued idea why major publications tend to give 9+/10 reviews to games, even when the actual text of their review clearly points to major issues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI).

The tl;dw version is that gamers, by and large, tend to disparage media outlets for giving poor ratings to games that aren't already widely disliked by the hive mind. It comes from the perspective of someone who does unbiased VG reviews, and I think it raises an interesting point that might otherwise be overlooked. (Of course, payola should certainly not be discounted as a factor.)

Now that you can download the full game from steam and return it for a full refund, who would prefer to play the demo? That said, you can find all kinds of demos in console stores.

> what happened to Shareware?

I think it's partly due to the massive drop in software prices (even a high end game can be had for $20-$30 if you catch it on a Steam sale, compared with $85+ in y2k dollars) so people just buy the software. Also many online stores have very liberal return policies so some people buy-then-refund just to try things out.

That price drop never came to Australia.

When I was a kid, triple-A games were around $80.

Now triple A-games start from $80, with special editions costing more.

Every now and then I see a sale on a game I'd been meaning to buy, but when I go to purchase, I see the base game for $40, and the 'full game' $70 (down from $100-$120).

The parent meant inflation adjusted. $50 US 20 years ago are equivalent to almost $80 today, but game prices have not increased at the same rate (they mostly stayed the same nominal price at launch but sales and heavy discounts are much more common).

Editions that actually come with all the content, including the stuff they held back to trickle it out over the next ~3-6mo, usually are more like $80-100 at launch. That seems to be how they've (the game companies) dealt with inflation. But yeah if you game way behind the times and don't do the latest hot multiplayer games, like I do then you rarely pay more than $30 for a game, average probably closer to $15-20 for non-indie games (lower for those, of course).

Stop buying from EB Games then! :P

I haven't bought a game from a bricks-and-mortar store since Diablo 3 came out.

TIL that EB Games is still a thing in Oz.

Before they were all converted to GameStops here (USA), as a joke I used to call the chain "Mo-B Games" because of the resemblance of the E in the logo to katakana 'mo' (モ).

We also had the world's second-last standing Blockbuster until earlier this year. :P

> The parent meant inflation adjusted

AU$80 in 2000 -> AU$128.38 in 2019

> Stop buying from EB Games then

Steam: Buy Call of Duty: WWII - Digital Deluxe. Released almost 2 years ago. 99,99€ = AU$163.42 (I'm in Europe at the moment. Anyone got an Australian price on this to prove me wrong?)

Blizzard in particular had the "spawn" option, which was more like a demo that you got directly from a friend who had the game. It also allowed you to play multiplayer with just the original CD Key owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation

That was a great feature. The Command & Conquer series by Westwood allowed something similar, since either disc (GDI/NOD or Allies/Soviets) contained the full installer and executable. This allowed both players in a head to head network game to run from the CDs.

You could even both play half the game in single player and then swap discs, but I'm not sure that really was the intention.

Steam has free to play where a drm enabled game is available for free to play for a weekend. I imagine the other download clients offer the same format as well.

I think if you take into account sales and inflation games are just cheaper now so it's less if a big deal. Also with all the reviews and twitch streams it's super easy to get a ton of information about a game.

Edit: I'll generally read reviews for games and if it's interesting I'll watch people play it. That combo has been similarly effective to demos for me.

My understanding is that companies have stopped doing shareware or demos because they sell less copies when shareware/demo is available. With a demo, only people that really like the game will buy it. Without a demo, anybody that wants to even try it needs to buy it.

Completely depends on the game. Great games lead to more sales -- mediocre/crap leads to less.

Blizz still has it with 'starter editions'. There's free to play soaking up a lot of people that would want that business model. A lot of people that care about what they're going to buy ahead of time get involved in predictions about the quality of the product and they will back them in early access. Steam frequently has 'free weekends' for games, so you can play it over the weekend. Also steam has a 2 hour or less window for refunding games you have bought.

And of course there's always piracy.

The business models have kind of exploded and it really depends on what kind of game you are talking about.

It became in-game purchases. Shareware was v1 of the model, and a very blunt instrument. It's evolved into free-to-play with paid upgrades, which is very much alive.

As a relatively ancient gamer with fond memories of shareware, I think it was the right solution for that time, but the time has passed. Remember that with shareware, distribution was often literal “sharing” of physical copies - almost all shareware I played came from clones of friend’s 3.5inch floppies. If you liked the game enough you often phoned the company to get the full game. This organic sharing process was critical to the shareware model at that time in an age when few household computers were connected to a network of any kind.

Now with widespread internet access shareware as physical distribution just doesn’t matter anymore, and we have a wealth of ways to determine if a game will be something you like - countless review sites, YouTube, Reddit, etc, etc.

Shareware arguably just doesn’t work all that well either in such a crowded modern gaming marketplace. There are thousands upon thousands of indie releases every year now, compared to the relatively trickle we got in the peak shareware days. With the extensive support tail modern software typically has (no more ship it and it’s done really, especially with network features...) the large number of players who would never upgrade to the paid version would still be a significant expense to support in many cases too. Commander Keen never had to worry himself with online cheat patches...

I think a much more convincing argument can be made that the shareware business evolved into the F2P nonsense we have now - it’s like shareware but without the hurdle of extracting money by a traditional up front price that better fits, rightly or wrongly, the current consumer expectations of software pricing.

I actually think the early-access model is similar in spirit if players can get a decent cut in price (say at least 25% off).

Now someone just needs to port the BoBaFeTT trainer(s) and the anti-hacks, anti-anti hacks, etc. Can’t wait to see people shooting arrows from their swords, getting PKed in town (and the town being covered in infinite fire and portals), level 1 loincloth guys suddenly equipping King's Sword of Haste and Godly Plate of the Mammoth when a duel starts etc.

Someone in this thread who played diablo!

Do you think the game would have had the same staying power if it was harder to cheat?

I wasn't a Diablo cheater, but I was a Diablo 2 cheater. Frankly, it was what made the game playable for me; I wasn't cheating to dupe items or anything like that, but making the damn map functional. It was definitely a huge part of the staying power of the game, IMO.

and crazy rare runewords, ubers, grinding for sets, etc. We learned a lot about planning content for "end game" in that era of gaming.

Diablo 1 had... I don't really remember. What did I do sinking hundreds of hours into the game?

It's hard to say. I don't think I would've gotten super deep into the dungeons without the help of some cheaters guiding me and dropping duped powerful items, so that was fun. But still, the game had a very compelling single player (which was more important in those days), and I played plenty of multiplayer with people who weren't cheating and it was still fun. So I think it still would've had an impact, especially with the interactive story, the unique controls/method of play, and the good graphics and overall polish (including the prerendered scenes).

PC gaming was very different 20+ years ago. It's not like there was social media chatter about how you had to check out this game with all the cheating and whatnot (maybe people did that on Usenet or something but I wasn't savvy enough to know about Usenet, and I'd argue the majority of new internet users coming online in the mid-late 90s weren't either). There was also no Google, YouTube, etc. to research games to buy - I'd buy a game based off the box art/marketing, or occasionally I'd buy a PC gaming magazine and see what they reviewed. Or talk to my friends and see what they've been playing. I'd also play the hell out of games I bought, partly because I had a longer attention span back then (I think we all did) but also because I'd rarely buy a new game, and we weren't exactly drowning in amazing PC games - there were no Steam backlogs back then calling out to you to pick up a new game the moment you got bored.

In short I don't think people were buying the game based on the cheating aspect. But I do think the cheating gave the multiplayer an unknown quantity that improved replayability and perhaps made it culturally memorable (it seems a lot of people remember the "duping" in here especially). Even so I think there easily would've been a Diablo II even if there was no cheating in Diablo.

If you're fine with playing on Windows/Mac/Linux instead of in a browser, and if you know some C++, you could go ahead and implement those things in Diablo directly. There's a reverse-engineered codebase on GitHub that the browser version is based on: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX

I'm very happy for every web port. Old games, old OSes emulated, old apps. Please, port / emulate everything! I've recently bought one of my childhood games (Pharaoh, released 1999) from GOG and struggled for hours to run it in Windows without errors and glitches. Eventually had to give up.

I'm quite confident that JavaScript/Web runtime will be sufficiently maintained for decades to come -- HTML websites from early 2000s run the same now as they did 20 years ago. The same can't be said for Windows runtimes.

So please, port everything you can to Web. It's the best way to preserve old stuff.

> HTML websites from early 2000s run the same now as they did 20 years ago.

Well, apart from the tens of thousands of flash games and videos that are being killed off as we speak.

There is still gnash I guess, but I've not used that in many years. It's a shame Adobe didn't open source flash when they EOL'd it.

You can still install flash right? So the flash experiences aren't getting lost necessarily.

Lots of Shockwave Era stuff getting lost though I agree. Also flash games that require a server backend

Both Chromium and Firefox will be removing it in 2020.

Once it has been removed, legacy websites hosting flash media won't really be able to fund themselves, so I imagine in the absence of a large archiving programme, we'll just lose it all.

The reason why I added HTML qualifier. Closed source tech cannot be trusted to be maintained. JS/HTML can.

Try dgVoodoo2, 99% of the issues with older games is due to DirectX abuse that at the time happened to work. dgVoodoo2 reimplements old versions of DirectX under Direct3D 11 with very lenient handling and it is by far the best wrapper for old DirectX and Glide. Almost every game i've had issues with under Windows 10 worked just fine using it.

Shareware download produces a 404 message. I don't see it in the github repo in the public/ [1] folder either. Maybe it was taken down recently?

[1] https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb/tree/master/public

https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb/issues/2

It's at https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq, they forgot to add the "/diabloweb" directory to the URL.

Resolved via work-around:

Simply download https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq and drag/drop the file onto the start screen to play.

Perfect opportunity to plug one of my favorite Diablo 1 mod projects. I am in no way affiliated with this project, just like the work that was done.

https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/features

Dupe trick still works, this is the good stuff

Only prints "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token <" in the console on Chrome under MacOS.

Edit: Same in Firefox

Works for me, MacOS 10.13.6 and Chrome 75.0.3770.100.

MacOS 10.14.3 and Chrome 75.0.3770.142 here. Not sure what's the issue.

I'm getting the error on Windows. Chrome 76.0.3809.87, Firefox 68.0.1, and Edge.

Same here, the minified JS returns the whole index HMTL.

Same here.

And same with Safari :/

What about other OSes? Is just a Mac issue?

I posted above I get the problem on Windows specifically version 10.

Same here, Ubuntu LTS, fails on Firefox and Chromium.

This version fails on a JS error for me, but this one works: https://sergi4ua.pp.ua/diabloweb/

I'm really tempted to launch this. But I'm in an open office, so no going to happen right now

You have to find a technical basis for it. Like inspecting new reverse engineering strategies.

I like this idea, but I'm not sure it's going to fly here. And reverse engineering is way out of the scope of our work. Oh well it can wait this evening.

"sorry but your lack of initiative in wasting company time is what decided us to let you free"

- HR in an alternate universe

Wanna come work for us? We don't care if you have a game open on your laptop, just that you get your work done.

I don't play games and i am proud of my work, but i pretty like the mentality of your workplace.

You know, I am surprised I am saying this, but I think I do too.

I'm on a client site with open office - double nope for now but tempting

what if i told you it works on your phone?

I'm in an open office too... but I ran it and just called everyone over to see, lol.

I can't find a description unfortunately - is this done via emscripten, or some new wasm magic, or something else?

The shareware .mpq is linked from a github page which corresponds to this repository: https://github.com/d07riv/diabloweb/

Which appears to reference source code here: https://github.com/d07RiV/devilution

Which appears to be emscripten based on the build scripts: https://github.com/d07RiV/devilution/blob/master/build.bat

Looks like a wasm compilation of Devilution, which is a decompiled / reverse engineered version of the original game (they left debug symbols in in some releases apparently).

It definitely violates their copyright if you were wondering. I doubt they care though.

Doesn't work on Linux Manjaro, tried using both Firefox (68.0.1) and Chromium (75.0.3770.142)

On my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and FF 67.0.1 it have launched fine after a second try, while the first one just froze

Silly question, if we can port this to web could we port it to Mac?

Run it in an Electron wrapper?

genius

Just so you can saturate a mid-level iMac Pro with a 25 year old game at 640x480, 256 colors

Yeah, I was really disappointed to learn that the recent port was made for Windows only.

It should be possible to run via wine then, right? (or compile with winelib)

I’ve actually fought with getting both my original copy and GoG copy to run in Wine for quite a few hours. Can’t seem to get past the start screen.

DevolutionX is available for Linux: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/releases

There is also a Mac release on there which is what I was asking about.

Sadly it's 32 bit and will soon stop working on MacOS? I wonder if this is resolvable.

And for Haiku too.

Its old enough that you ca-n just run it in virtualbox

That has already been done, DevilutionX is available for Mac (and Linux): https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/releases

Clicked on the "Play Shareware" button and received a pretty message in a red box: "Request failed with status code 404." That was fun.

I will pay good money for System Shock 2 on the browser!

Request failed, error code 404. Did we kill it boys?!

It's some bug - tries to load https://d07riv.github.io/spawn.mpq while actual working url is https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq

For some reason this only works for me if I'm not using a Private tab in Firefox.

Better than this only letting us download the savegames!

Works better than on Wine :D (nearly)

Ahh fresh meat!

Still vividly remember the first time I met this bloodthirsty bugger!

only way i can beat that guy is get him trapped in the stairwell to the third level

hugged to death?

Super nice

I only have a concern about how this works : Is it a client-side computation of the loaded file OR a livestream of the game with only a check on the uploaded-file to verify if no copyright enforcement is bypassed ?

It's running in your browser on your computer.

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