Half-Life 2 in a Browser

And Quake 3: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/

And Unreal Tournament: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut

There's also https://noclip.website/ which, while not playable, has hundreds of levels from dozens of older games that you can explore freely. Including Half-Life 2, with more accurate rendering than this web port (which seems to be missing many shaders including character eyes).

Interesting, I am not able to play HL2 on Steam because macOS no longer has 32-bit support and Valve never compiled if for 64-bit but here we are, it’s playable on the same OS in the browser.

BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.

Here is a link to the blog post since I didn’t see it mentioned

https://www.slqnt.dev/blog/hl2-in-web

That's also the kind of Website, beside the impressive technical result, that reminds me nothing can be blocked.

It's not about bypassing VPN or deep pack inspection, rather it's about how once anything, including a very complex video game (like here) to an entire OS with a host machine (like QEMU on WASM, or a random InternetArchive link about emulation) is "just" a Web page that can be hosted... on anything (including a 10 bucks Rasperry Pi Zero which can also be an AP, a phone obviously, heck even a e-cig!) then it doesn't matter what is "blocked" as it can be brought to anyone with no installation.

Cool!

I recently ported Doom on browser so that you can easily play multi-player (up to 4) completely free (you can host it yourself on Cloudflare)

https://playdoom.ossy.dev/

With WASM and WebGL being mature technologies, I'm not sure why there aren't more video games published this way. For really big games with lots of assets, having those assets in local storage makes sense. But I wouldn't mind if a game "installer" is just your browser asking "This game wants to use up to 20 GB of local disc space. Is that okay?"

As much as I dislike webdev stuff, I love the way you can distribute entire programs through WASM. Super cool stuff! For those who are interested, I recommend checking out Godot for exporting games on the web. It's really easy to do and you can host it on Itch.io

Whew. Crashed before I sunk my day there.

The ugliest site in the world that just starts loading and saving files without user interaction.

Give me a play button, let me initiate the install, show me what the hell it is first.

This looks no different than a scam phishing link

I just wish Valve could add official macos-arm64 builds of the various hl2 games on Steam :-/

Does anyone know some of the rebinded controls? The main menu doesn't show them and I can't figure out how to reopen the menu during gameplay or any using the bindings that are usually set to the function keys. The page doesn't seem to have any info included like that kind of thing.

Edit 1: crouch is bound to C according to the blog post, but that's the only one mentioned. Edit 2: You can use key_listboundkeys from console. Also can just open the menu with `

Platforms like geforce now are already the superior ways of playing on Mac, as so many games are never ported and old games stop working.

I wish there were more github deployments of these, when people make these custom websites they are more likely to be blocked

First half life one in browser now we have half life 2! I guess it’s that time again Mr Freeman

I remember saving up for a year to buy the ATI Radeon 9600 XT (I think it was $200 MSRP) so I could play the game on high settings. Now we can play it inside a virtual machine on a crappy laptop. What a journey

Ah! Just in time for HL3

Input doesn’t work so well on my iPad (lol) but seeing that intro rendered in safari on said ipad, wild. So cool

The screens are missing and the lips don't move, but it's pretty close!

What's the biggest bottleneck you hit - GPU compute, memory bandwidth, or network latency for asset streaming? Curious how it compares to native WebGPU.

What a time to be alive. My suggestion: progress bars instead of throbbers during loading data.

Very cool. The download progress bar is broken though, it receives values 0-1 but the max is set to 300.

If anyone is nostalgic about HL2 and want's revisit it, I highly recommend Black Mesa remake, it's mind blowing in a good way.

If they have halflife 2 in the browser, I wonder if this means they can do original CS in the browser too!

few questions

1) how are games now showing up in browser?

2) how are they porting it, whats the process, can LLM do it?

3) how is it legal? how are they monetizing it ?

What a time to be alive :D

Is there a repo for this ? Can we mod it ?

play-cs.com

What about gaming on a mac?

This is cool, and also probably illegal, since you don't own any of this and don't have the right to redistribute it.

How is it that this came to my Apple-Silicon Mac before Valve could do it natively? How could it possibly be easier to create a complete-enough virtual machine that runs in a browser and the compiler for it than it is to port the native application?

I wish we could spend as much time on native application development as we do on horribly crippled and slow browser application development.

Web technology is so non-sensical to me. "you can run an application without installing it!" Well, friend, installation is not required either, and we can deliver applications on demand, and we've done it before. "You just visit a page and you can program the macros on your keyboard!" Again, it's not like those applications are large; they could be delivered on demand if we wanted.

But we don't want that, do we? We want people to remain online under any circumstance, we desparately want their time, so we require that people be online if they want to program their microcontroller and they don't know how to do it without visiting the very convenient webpage.

If people spent 10% of the effort on native applications that they spent on web applications, we would be so much further advanced than we are now. If you're a developer, targeting the web is so seductive, so easy in comparison, that we all have to be online to do anything, now. We all have to run two dozen Electron apps because developers want to have an easy time at the expense of every user.

Looks pretty good

i need a gary's mod

Cool, but then game hangs in city square.

I've played this from the start until around Ravenholm probably close to a hundred times. It's so familiar to me. There's some funky stuff going on for me, though. The characters' eyes are all wrong. G-man had no eyes at all. And the giant screen with Breen on it was missing.

Can't believe it runs as well as it does on my non-gaming laptop without even seeming to struggle. It's funny when you leave a hobby for a while. I haven't played games since the HL2 era so for me this is still state of the art.

I did say a couple of years ago that if HL3 ever came out, and it was good, that it would make me buy another gaming PC. But with current prices I don't even think that would make me do it.

Tried it on my M4 iPad Pro and was surprised that it works - to a degree. NPCs (Gman and the citizens on the train) seem to be missing eyes and have no mouth animations. FPS was pretty poor too, and it was ass to use the camera on the trackpad.

nice game

What I find incredibly impressive is that it just loaded in and seems to work fine on my phone. So cool.

I loaded this up on my old Intel MacBook half-expecting it to crash instantly, and it actually ran through the train station at a solid clip before falling over in the canals. Anyone know how the shader work compares to the actual Source engine?

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While technically impressive, this is also illegal. (unless you have redistribution permission from the authors.)