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Comment by q_andrew | Hacker News Reader

Download time is the biggest setback for games in the browser in my experience.

That's why games running in browsers need a different approach to asset loading, instead of downloading everything upfront, stream the asset data directly from CDN when needed. It's nothing new, games had to deal with streaming data from slow mass storage devices throughout their entire history.

That's not an option for most games. That means I now either need to be online-only with a good enough internet connection and latency to stream this game (a la Stadia but worse since it's not just video) or I need to download it into an offline cache which now brings us back to the same spot.

Traditional MMO games have the same requirements, and it works fine. Some of them also allow starting the game while only a fraction of the asset data has been downloaded and continue downloading while the game is running.

> Traditional MMO games have the same requirements, and it works fine.

I mean, no. I definitely wouldn't want to endure the waiting time I have every time I play some MMO if I'm playing a single player game.

Our team is working on exactly this - an asset streaming system developers can utilize for Unreal Engine that only fetches what a players needs to see at any given moment, nothing more.

Combined with compression, you can get players into desktop-quality games in WASM in seconds on most computers.

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