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Comment by timje1 | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft in the browser has been done already, hasn't it? It'd be pretty trivial, as it's been ported to java / c# / objective c already, and has low system requirements.

Given that asm.js games tend to run at something like 15-30% of the speed of native code, I doubt we'll see Battlefield 4 or Starcraft 2 anytime soon. Additionally, given that the WoW game client is many gigabytes in size, I doubt we'll see that either, even if it could run.

So: Minecraft, yes. The rest? No.

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There have been minecraft like demos that implement about 1% of the functionality of minecraft.

Citation on the 15-30% claim? We see more like 50%, including compilation time. Sometimes much faster on certain benchmarks (Bullet IIRC?) now that float32 support has landed.

Also, much of these games is 3D rendering, and WebGL runs at essentially full native performance.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/monster-madness-creating-g...

This is from a link in the article for more information. These Monster Madness fellows found Firefox gave them 33% of native performance, and Chrome 20%. Presumably IE would give you fractions of these figures.

I figured that, rather than citing figures from benchmarks, I'd go for the real world scenario that this release has given us.

Those figures seem to be in the context of a week long initial port. The team lead uses a figure of 50% in the video.

Minecraft is FAR bigger and more complicated than people give it credit for. Getting a terrain generation demo running in a browser is not even remotely the same thing.

I think he's talking about the apps for the various ecosystems. Although they're not feature-complete.

Well, no, they're not as rich as the desktop versions.

But as they've had a team port (a trimmed version of) Minecraft to xbox live arcade, and the iPad, it would surprise me if they're not already working on a *.js version.

Is it that big of a leap from voxel.js, which is already doing this with pure javascript? (genuinely curious)

Minecraft started as a Java browser plugin game. I think that's what the GP is referring to, not "Show HN: Minecraft in 3 lines of Javascript"

https://minecraft.net/classic/

The WoW client already supports streaming, you can play the game after downloading only the core content. Even that is pretty large though, but it could be optimized for the web.

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