Show HN: I ported an XBox Live Indie Game to HTML5 in 2 days. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I ported an XBox Live Indie Game to HTML5 in 2 days.

luminance.org

49 pointskevingadd24 comments

Site seems to be getting hammered, so here's a direct link to the demo: http://hildr.luminance.org/Lumberjack/Lumberjack.html

Open articleView on HN

Sigh, reading about javascript hacks reminds me how horrible the application development environment for browsers is. Web browsers are fundamentally not designed to enable the development of complex modern applications. That needs to change if web-apps are the future.

I didn't see anything horrible being said about the development for browsers. The problems were mostly XNA functionalities that he hadn't implemented in his XNA to html5 converter.

These kinds of sprite based games have been around for decades and used to be developed on hardware orders of magnitude less powerful. The fact that such a thing would ever have performance problems on modern hardware is a joke and shows how backwards web development is.

I like to think that web development with all these new "features" enable people a nice playground to get hooked. While I'm disappointed that the there is no easy "mode 13" to get started with fun graphics programming, I'm optimistic that a platform is getting built that enables people to iterate on making things fun that will then drive people to go deeper in the stack.

Cached version here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OT6g2bc...

Sorry about that, despite having CloudFlare caching in front of it, the web server completely fell over. It should be redirecting to a working mirror now.

Awesome technology, thanks!

Crashed my Firefox and in Chrome it clips and moves worse than similar games on my 133MHz machine back in the day.

Now can you port it to pure CSS? How about ASCII art in streaming JSON?

i5/4GB MacBook Air

9fps here on i7 with chrome, almost as fast as minecraft :)

Strange, my little 2.4 Core Duo was fine with it (~30fps) and typically does very badly with these games. For contrast Minecraft can cause this laptop to overheat and shut down if not using an additional cooling stand. Perhaps I don't need to upgrade after all!

Sorry to hear that it crashed Firefox.

In my experience it's basically impossible for a demo like this to run well without both a good GPU and a good CPU. Even when you use WebGL, rendering code uses a vast amount of CPU time compared with native alternatives.

Small nitpick: I would differentiate between HTML5 and WebGL and would describe this as a WebGL game.

That said I died two times in level 3.

It doesn't require WebGL. If you only have Canvas, it'll use Canvas. It works in IE9.

I have no idea what do do with those rock throwing people.

The masked person bugged out and attacked me with no delay between his attacks - there was just a buzz of the sound effect being played and my character being taken from half health to 0.

Haha same here regarding the rock throwers - they should definitely stagger when heavy hit or something.

Technically the port was flawless for me, performance was good on 2.2GHz i7 Macbook Pro / Chrome 18.0.

edit: The unlock full version button didn't work for me (not sure if that's a technical issue or deliberate because it's not implemented yet.)

The unlock link opens a popup, so that probably got blocked by your browser.

That sounds like maybe the framerate was so low that the game logic wasn't keeping up with the system clock. I'm betting the AI is written to throw a rock once every N seconds, so if your framerate dips too low, he'll throw rocks pretty rapidly.

Do you know how fast it was running? I want to make sure you weren't actually hitting a bug in the translated code that I need to fix :)

I didn't play it much but the bug did only happen once.

It runs at 60 f/s.

Seems like some debugging keys are enabled. Currently L and Q skips the current level and P freezes the game.

Awesome port und JS/browser/canvas/webgl tech demo.

I think the gameplay is ok for a casual game (kind of doubledragon style and fun) but the overall style, the topic, the enemies, the beard, the story is not on par with the tech

Do you think it is possible to do this in a generic fashion, or would you have to port games one at a time?

If you had a generic implementation of all the libraries, you could probably do this automatically, but having the game source code and doing some tuning produces much better results.

It seems not to work on Linux.

Works fine here: Arch x86_64, Chromium 18.0.1025.142, Radeon 4850 w/ xf86-video-ati.

Didn't work here. Arch x86_64, Chromium 18.0.1025.151, Intel Mobile 4.

Even starting with `chromium --enable-webgl --ignore-gpu-blacklist`.

Worked fine on Windows though. Good job porting it to the Web, very funny game :)

If you clear your cache and try it again it might work now. I improved the handling of busted WebGL implementations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com