The V8 is an incredibly good VM. It has compute performance comparable with Rust in Debug mode for a single core, or comparable to the JVM with a single core. That’s plenty for a great many game genres, and for ALL of the game genres that I am personally interested in playing.
CrossCode, Game Dev Tycoon, Curious Expedition, Screeps, FoundryVTT
I feel somewhat confident that there are others, but the devs of these games were somewhat public about what technologies they used. I can easily imagine other very popular games like FTL, Darkest Dungeons, Slay the Spire, etc having made use of browser tech, even though I have no idea if they did or not.
The fact that I bought these games (in some cases on multiple platforms), spent countless hours playing them, and never had a complaint about performance, should be evidence enough that browser tech is plenty good for delivering high quality games that people are happy to pay good money for.
Heck, the fact that it was possible to do this three decades ago ought to be evidence enough that you don't need something better than V8 (or even a potato) to make great games that "scale" in terms of number of players and in terms of purchases.
If you mean VM performance, you can always play the Computer Language Benchmarks Game: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
You'll find that of course languages like C++ and Rust can perform better. But is that level of performance necessary to pull off a great game with a big paying audience in 2021? Absolutely not.
Eventually you won't be able to afford anything beyond 10W! Javascript is not an option on 10W for action MMO games with real character graphics.
We are talking "metaverse" levels of complexity, and all the games both of you list are very simple compared to that.
I do think your low powered engine project is very cool though.
The 3D action part of this equation is very important, without it you cannot trick the reptile brain that you are actually there, 3D MMORPGs don't trigger this at all, f.ex!
Also if you use that excuse to keep building wasteful software you are not part of a solution.
Likewise I’m skeptical in such an energy scenario we’d have affordable internet access or supply chains to build and equip people with low power computers.
Let’s hope we don’t have to find out!
What I'm saying is that today we use the internet for mostly non interesting stuff when we all can be gods and create interconnected worlds with our minds!
It sounds like you are working to enable VR based massively multiplayer games with very low energy/compute requirements. I absolutely applaud you for that. I think it’s awesome. It just doesn’t match your original claim, that performance better than js is necessary for creating a viable game in 2021.
Possibly you meant 3D/VR MMO, but that’s not what I took you to mean when I first responded to your comment about js as a viable engine for communal game building.
Post link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28723689
Game link: https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html