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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

For what purpose, though? Why saddle yourself with the overhead & restrictions of WASM and the limitations of WebGL (or even WebGPU), just to run in a browser? The typical answer for running in a browser is the fast deployment, but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway, then what's the point? Just to avoid needing an install wizard? And in case you aren't aware, 20GB would actually be a relatively small game. 60GB+ is quite common now (the more recent call of duties tip the scales at 140GB)

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> but if the user has to sit through a 20GB download anyway, then what's the point?

They don't have to unless the game makes them. Assets can be streamed in. This Half Life 2 port streams in each chapter so you are playing without having the entire game downloaded. World of Warcraft is over 100GB but you can start playing with only a fraction complete and it will continue downloading as you play

Performance of the game is much more important than download time

Its really common to sacrifice disk space for runtime perf

For gamers 100GB is not a big deal, CoD is like 200GB and its extremely popular

I disagree with your assertion that games running in a browser are not performant enough. WebAssembly being ~45% slower than native sounds scary, sure, but that's basically what you can expect from using any non-native language anyway. So if Unity is performant enough where all C# code has similar overhead then it should all be fine.

Plus not all games are AAA.

Unity doesn't use C# for everything. Notably the game engine itself is not C# but C++. C# is essentially just the scripting language.

You're also ignoring the overhead of WASM -> WebGPU -> native graphics API, not to mention how much harder it is to develop and debug that platform than it is a native one.

Unity is just an example. And depending on the game you may actually be doing heavy work in "just the scripting language" instead of the engine. XNA, MonoGame, Love2D, etc. are all frameworks rather than game engines so they're absolutely doing typical engine work in the scripting language, if you need a different example.

> You're also ignoring the overhead of WASM -> WebGPU -> native graphics API

Wine -> DXVK -> native graphics API works great for many people. I can't imagine it having significantly worse performance characteristics, especially when WebGPU is closer to the native graphics API than DirectX on Linux is.

> not to mention how much harder it is to develop and debug that platform than it is a native one.

But why? You still have access to a debugger.

> XNA, MonoGame, Love2D, etc. are all frameworks rather than game engines so they're absolutely doing typical engine work in the scripting language, if you need a different example.

And games using low end frameworks like that are already plentiful on the web, such as on itch.io. Heck you can even find games using Unity there, too.

> especially when WebGPU is closer to the native graphics API than DirectX on Linux is.

Uh... no? no it's not? WebGPU is rather high level & feature limited, which is why it can even be implemented on top of GLES 3.1. It's cutting edge for the web, but compared to native it's positively ancient.

Meanwhile DX12 and Vulkan are quite competitive on features and behaviors. Also most people aren't going through such a translation at all in the first place regardless, so I don't know why you're framing it as some given.

Half Life 2 is only ~4-6gb and was designed to run on video cards with 128-512mb of RAM, and it didn't even do texture streaming so you just need to have those assets at load time. Sure you can stream those low res textures at an acceptable rate. That's wholly different from streaming the textures for a modern game, which are at least an order of magnitude larger, and are expecting to stream in from NVME/SSD storage.

This website is also a proof of concept, it doesn't care if people are actually able to play it consistently. It can afford to just say "anyone with less than 100mbps internet gets a shitty experience, lol don't care" and nobody will complain, because it's a free tech demo. Not an actual product trying to sell copies and make money. And certainly not anything remotely modern, we are talking about an over 20 year old game here. Technology did, in fact, get a little bit faster and more capable over those last 20 years, you know

Assets can be streamed in for non-browser based games as well. Star Craft 2 would stream in FMV cutscenes. In fact, most recent Blizzard games have allowed players go start playing after only downloading ~30% of the game. At least that's what I remember from Diablo 4.

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