Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shish2k | Hacker News Reader

Web Apps set us back 20 years in pretty much every respect except ease of deployment (1992 - people are impressed that Wolfenstein 3D gets 60FPS on a 100MHz Pentium; 2012 - people are impressed that Wolfenstein 3D (in Javascript!!!!111omg) gets 15FPS without sound on an 8-core 3GHz box).

With the exponential rate of development I doubt it'll take a full 20 years to catch up, but it'll still be a while before we've completely reinvented all of the wheels...

But yeah, for the forseeable future, "look at how I re-implemented this ancient technology with modern foundations, and it only took half the time! (And 10% of the efficiency and 100x more RAM)" is all we have to look forward to :-(

View on HN

Parity is the wrong measuring stick.

Web app performance will always be playing catchup with native, and while the performance gap may shrink (perhaps to the point of irrelevance) it will never be eliminated. The OS and device makers are making the rules.

The real future is in our increasing ability to recognize and build to unique platform advantages in integrated ways. Dismissing the web platform as merely 'distribution' minimizes the value of a universally accessible, instant connection to everyone. It allows for different kinds of experiences unrelated to native performance. As the performance gap b/w platforms decreases, we may see more rich experiences for a web audience that's interacting in realtime with native or console users, broadening what's possible for everyone.

I think this overlooks all the pluses of this new "medium". How did you get your copy of wolfenstein in 1992? Travel to the radioshack, get a stack of disks, feed them one by one into your trs80? Within seconds this morning I was playing this game - with a 1000 other people simultaneously. Amazing in my book.

It's not competing with 1992 distribution though, it's competing with 2013 distribution.

I just bought my son a digital edition of Diablo 3 the other day. It was far from smooth sailing.

But is Diablo 3 played in a browser? Thought so.

In exactly what way is this question a follow-on from the parent comment? The statement was, to paraphrase: "Purchasing and installing native applications can still suck, even with '2013 distribution'." IOW, all that's been saved in 20-odd years is the drive to the retail store, the drudgery of swapping floppies and (usually) the task of manually configuring a memory manager. We're far from an instant-on, pay-and-play world for native apps (and in some cases you still need to be connected to get moment-by-moment permission to run the app you "purchased"—the internet as dongle).

You had a problem with it? I haven't tried Diablo 3 specifically, but I find in most modern distribution platforms like Steam (or similar utilities from Blizzard) you just buy, click, walk away for 2 hours, and when you come back the game is installed and ready to play. It couldn't be easier to install native apps! -- when every thing works correctly.

One particular thing I noticed about Diablo is that it was playable long before it actually finished downloading. Most of the maps, video and artwork was downloaded as I played the first few levels. Pretty cool.

I could also be playing Wolfenstein or one of many, many games in about a minute via Steam.

Wolf3D was shareware, so the preferred method was simply to make copies of the floppy and distribute them to all of your friends. I remember having more games than I could play in ~1993.

I don't remember how I got it but I'm sure I didn't go to a store. It really wasn't that hard to get either through BBSs or copying from a friend. It went viral and everyone had a copy. BTW, by 1992 PC clones had won, trs80s were long gone.

A 100Mhz Pentium in 1992? More like a 25Mhz 486 if you were lucky, my friend made it run on a 286. And you'd get about 15fps, wolf3d used to give people brutal motion sickness.

Wolf3D is also an interesting example because the rendering is done in software (so your high powered HD video card doesn't help at all) and I guess a lot of development time was spent writing asm routines/hacks to take shortcuts with the necessary math.

To be fair, a lot of the reason that people are remaking these old games is because people like playing old style games and the people building these demos are probably doing it in a very small team (or even solo).

It should certainly be possible to remake Half-Life (maybe even HL2?) entirely in javascript/WebGL or make more sophisticated 3D games. But we won't see it until some bigger gamedev is willing to risk a fair chunk of change on the browser as a gaming platform.

> But we won't see it until some bigger gamedev is willing to risk a fair chunk of change on the browser as a gaming platform.

They are, just as they're active on mobile platforms - EA, Epic and Square-Enix are notable examples. But they don't bother with AAA games (much as they like to pretend they are and attach them to those franchises), instead they target the casual player, that spends up to half an hour on a game per time, and/or that gets addicted to addicting games (w/ microtransactions). And the formula works for them; low development cost (5 - 10 dev team), high returns. Epic's Infinity Blade (and sequel) are the highest grossing games (in terms of development cost versus returns) of all time, at least, for Epic.

A 286? LUXURY! We only had a 8086 with half a megabyte and we had to hook it up to a bicycle generator to get electricity for it!

8086, you were lucky!

What did you have? A TI-81 calculator?

"wolf3d used to give people brutal motion sickness."

Most FPS still give me motion sickness, but I distinctly remember throwing up with the first Wolfenstein.

A 486SX 33 in my case. Couldn't afford the math co-processor at the time. :)

My family's first computer was a 486DX33 w/ 8MB of RAM. I'm not sure if it was in 1992 or a bit later though.

This is a naive interpretation. It's easy to imagine that "application quality or capability" is some easily measured metric tied to easy to measure numbers (like FPS or megahertz). In reality for many applications performance is not the long pole, so moving them to the web adds many advantages. I find it weird that someone could make the claim that "web apps set us back 20 years" in 2013, when web apps have transformed the world economy so tremendously (google search, web mail, amazon, online banking and investing, etc.)

> (google search, web mail, amazon, online banking and investing, etc.)

The transformative power of all of those (excepting maybe GMail) was realized in the form of cgi-generated webpages (click, refresh). Performance is not a requirement for those applications, whereas it is very much a requirement for interactive games. 20 years might be a little too harsh, but only a little.

Performance is the most important feature. Also on web apps. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22performance+is+the+most+i... 2M hits on exact match can't be wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com