Comment by nbadg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nbadg | Hacker News Reader

For those that can't get it to load (it takes a minute, and I noticed my desktop's fan kick it up a notch while things were getting initialized, so... YMMV): this is a portfolio site done via a cozy-gaming-style AWSD game where you drive around in a jeep-like thingamabob. There are some cute easter eggs, including a sort of... shrine to each of the socials, which you can run into with your car and knock over (though the links remain clickable, of course!). It also looks like there's some degree of global state; for example, you can "sacrifice yourself to the gods of chaos" (ie drive into a portal) and a counter on the side of the portal goes up, presumably for everyone (since I certainly didn't drive into it 1700 times myself!). There's a strongly consistent art style, and just generally... seems pretty polished. Or at least, that's what it felt like after 5 minutes of driving around.

All in all I'd say, I'm impressed, and enjoyed it. Though I think the HN title ("handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites") is maybe a bit much. It's an extremely-well-executed portfolio site; no more, no less.

> Though I think the HN title ("handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites") is maybe a bit much.

How many cooler 3D websites do you know? I personally know less than 10, and only https://messenger.abeto.co/ off the top of my head.

Wow. Messenger is beautiful!

Honestly I wouldn’t call that a website. It’s a 3D game that runs on the web.

If you count game demos on the web, then Epic Citadel, based on the port of Unreal Engine to various mobile and web platforms including HTML5/WebGL/asm.js, had a much detailed and more 3D world - it used all 3 dimensions fully, unlike OP which appears to be a flat world that’s quite restricted vertically. That demo first came out about 15 years ago, with the HTML5 version coming out a few years later.

Since then I’ve seen several other sites along similar lines, since Unity released a similar capability, but I haven’t kept track of them. The problem is they’re all essentially games that are more impressive for their look than their functionality, so they tend to have a spike of interest when people first see them and then you never hear of them again. And typically, the tech bitrots and the sites stop working after a while.

I navigated using touch on my iPhone and it felt a lot like playing Genshin Impact

Safari highlighted something and it highlighted the whole screen and I couldnt get it to unselect

That’s a classic issue with these, and often not solvable by the web developer - an issue with mobile browsers themselves that’s hard to get around

It's trivially solvable with CSS though, isn't it? See the beginning of this stylesheet for example: https://github.com/mvasilkov/board2024/blob/master/out/app.c... — this is from my small 2024 game.

You mean the select: none, along with the drag setting?

If so, that's not necessarily followed/applied for accessibility reasons

If your game is essentially a single canvas element, having it user-selectable clearly doesn't help accessibility in any way.

You say that as if I've got any control over the browser on the end users device, some of which will be configured to not apply these rules globally for accessibility reasons...

Alas no, it doesn’t solve it for all browsers/use cases.

Better collision detection and clipping than Genshin Impact though

It is cool.

I am irked that on desktop it does not work in Firefox, but only in Chrome (and presumably other Chromium based browsers).

I'm not a big fan of Chrome, for a variety of reasons, but principally because I don't trust it and can no longer use a good ad blocker, so I never really enjoy having to fire it up.

Weird, I had no issues playing it on FF.

Plays fine on FF.112

After watching developer's "making of" video, I went and grabbed my USB gamepad (from twenty years ago) — whenever the gamepad is plugged in, Bruno's gamesite stops responding (until controller is unplugged).

I would recon if this isn't playing on your end, it has more to do with using uncommon hardware configurations (not necessarily lack of horsepower).

I played it on Firefox on MacOS! Are you on an old version?

Nope, bang up to date, disabled all extensions - just did all the obvious stuff that can hamper sites from operating.

It worked surprisingly well on ddg browser, iOS, iPhone mini 12. So, impressive!

All browsers on iOS are (still, though sadly not for long…) the same browser. Only the skin changes.

Why is that sad?

Because Apple's walled garden is for your own good, Citizen.

So WebKit is the walled garden? I thought it was the App Store.

The App Store is the walled garden that doesn't allow anyone else to ship a browser engine, except in certain markets where they have been forced by law to create a "Web Browser Engine Entitlement" that non-WebKit browsers can use with super special permission from Apple.

And so many strings attached that they don't really do so in practice :(

When it avoids a chrome (and thus google) monopoly: yes. And don’t talk to me about Firefox engine. Its market share is negligible and the whole thing only even still exists because google allows it.

I would agree with this except Apple had done a terrible job of keeping up with standards ala IE for the longest time.

Because so many people use iPhones as their primary devices it's hard for businesses to accept making their websites only support browsers which are built off Chromium. It somewhat limits the power Google has to unilaterally dictate web standards.

Luckily not for long you mean?

I for one am looking forward to full-on Firefox with extensions etc.

You can already have Firefox extensions on iOS with Orion.

not so well on chrome on ihpone xr sadly. But perhaps thats asking too much of a tired 7yr old device.

Is it really "extremely well executed" if it takes so long to load that I've closed the tab before seeing anything because it looks broken?

Yes because games take time to load, they are asset heavy.

It has no load progress indicator.

AWSD == WASD?

Or WARS, if you're colemak

is ,AOE too far?

The best one.

Also works on mobile

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