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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

That's kinda untrue - there are games (not necessarily high end ones, but quite sophisticated ones nontheless).

The biggest issue is the API limitations that restrict you from doing things a certain modern way, and you have to use more mid 2000s techniques.

Here's a game that uses an Electron powered engine that uses Js and WebGL:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1210800/Rum__Gun/

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I would be impressed if it actually was available on a browser, without native help.

And that is Flash 3D quality, we would expect something better 15 years later.

It does run without the browser, it's just that on Steam, people expect an executable.

And sorry for the lack of quality - this project was built by just one guy who did custom everything (art, engine, editor, writing, music etc.) - it's super impressive imo. I'm sure if you replaced the models and textures with better looking ones (at no increase of technical complexity), it would look better.

Having looked at just the trailer on steam, it does look impressive, especially for a one man effort.

It is available in a browser, the demo at least:

https://www.gamepix.com/play/rum-and-gun

Honestly I've come to view the "it's the API's fault" as cope.

There are times when it is legitimately true, but it's far easier to say that your would have been amazing efforts were blocked because you needed obscure feature of prototype GPU than it is to accept you were never going to get close in the first place for completely different reasons.

No, it's a valid complaint. Even before hardware raytracing a huge amount of code was moving to compute shaders, most global illumination techniques in the last 10-15 years is easier to implement if you can write into random indices (often you can refactor to collecting reads but it's quite cumbersome and will almost certainly cost in performance).

Even WebGL 2 is only equivalent of GLES 3.1 (and that's maybe a low 4.1 desktop GL equivalent). I think my "software" raytracing for desktop GL was only feasible with GL 4.3 or GL 4.4 if i remember correctly (And even those are kinda ancient).

> No, it's a valid complaint.

For what?

This is exactly what I am talking about: successful 3D products don’t need raytracing or GI, the bulk of the audience doesn’t care, as shown by the popularity of the Switch. Sure those things might be nice but people act like they are roadblocks.

Yes and no, Nintendo properties has a certain pull that aren't available for everyone.

But also, I'm pretty sure that even the Switch 1 has far more capable graphics than WebGL 2. Doom Eternal is ported to it and reading a frame teardown someone did they mentioned that parts of it are using compute.

Yes, you can do fairly cool stuff for a majority of people but old API's also means that you will spend far more time to get something halfway decent (older worse API's just takes more time to do things with than the modern ones).

That is PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 kind of graphics level, yet we hardly see them on any browser, other than some demos.

PS3/XB360 level graphics still requires a fair bit of content and the web-game-ecosystem kinda died off with Flash and people moved onto mobile or focused on marketplaces like Steam/XBIndie,etc.

I do think we're due for a new wave of web-based gaming though, web audio just wasn't near maturity when Flash went and the mobile/steam/xbindie marketplaces still worked for indies. But now with all the crowding and algorithm changes people are hurting and I think it might just be a little spark needed for a major shift to occur.

Agree that there will be a revitalization of web gaming, here's a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running in WebGPU: (only runs on Windows atm)

https://play.spacelancers.com/

WebGL2 is GLES 3.0, not 3.1 (that would be big because 3.1 has storage buffers and compute shaders).

Thanks for correcting, I only remembered that 3.2 was the latest so went one down since I remembered compute wasn't part but seems it was in 2 steppings. :)

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