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Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

I think Javascript is too slow for 3d gaming.

If you look at this HTML5/WebGL minecraft engine, it stutters even without any other players or bots in the environment.

http://voxeljs.com/#gallery

Meanwhile Minecraft running in Java is smooth on even the slowest machines.

Benchmarks indicate that Javascript is 4x slower than Java.

http://j15r.com/blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum

The alternatives like ASM.js and PNACL are far from usable. ASM.js has no support for threads and PNACL is unlikely to be supported outside of Chrome. They also have no debugging support.

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This is exactly what they said about Java ten years ago (and I still hear it today): "Java is way to slow for games/anything performance-critical".

The choice of Java in your argument is kind of ironic to me.

Minecraft isn't exactly a very demanding game.

Also 10 years ago Java was nowhere near as fast as it is now. If you are saying that Javascript might be an option 10 years from now, I am not disagreeing with you.

Its actually very demanding, CPU and memory wise.

The question for that is whether that CPU and memory use is required by the game, or the result of the language and runtime used to craft it.

Java has gotten faster in the last decade, but it's still not used for games where performance matters.

Actually minecraft gets pretty shaky on my mbp 2009.

My minecraft server can get bogged down just my wife and I playing. That's on a core2duo 2.0GHz with 4GB.

It plays better on my phone.

Too slow? Then try this: http://www.endtime.at/demo.html#gamestart

That actually stutters rather a lot on my Chromebook Pixel :(

It also stutters on my i5-750. Not exactly the newest CPU, but it runs every modern native game just fine.

Your demo was also choppy for me on 2.2 Core 2, 460m, Chrome 29, Win7.

After your experience with both native and WebGL game development, don't you think it's a little premature to make a hardcore game targeting only WebGL?

Thanks for sharing Irrlicht engine with us!

In addition to all the stuttering it looks terrible graphics wise.

Your performance is not typical. Webgl performance is dependent upon drivers and system config. For other people like myself those demos run smoothly.

As a hardcore SC2 player, I'd only be interested in a native version of this game. Even the latest ASM.JS demos like Epic Citadel run chopping on my system. Hardcore gamers like myself won't sacrifice performance for a the luxury using poorly designed and immature technology like JS and WebGL.

And Epic's demo was their previous gen engine, Unreal Engine 3, which targets mobile platforms: iOS, Android, PSP... Meanwhile, the state of the art UE4 is only aimed at next gen consoles and native PCs games.

> They also have no debugging support.

When emscripten is passed the debug flag, it will generate source maps, which will let you step through your code, although inspecting variables still isn't a solved problem.

JS port of Box2D is dead since 2008.

Why is that relevant? It is still a valid example of non-trivial game code.

https://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/ tracks box2dFlash which was last updated in 2011.

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