Half-Life 2 in a Browser

211

ppanza about 3 hours ago 71 commentsRead Article on hl2.slqnt.dev

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Discussion (71 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

modeless•about 3 hours ago

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).

calebj0seph•about 2 hours ago

Also The Simpsons Hit & Run! https://shar-wasm.cjoseph.workers.dev/

sho_hn•about 2 hours ago

And Tomb Raider

https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu

Fan remake of the levels to avoid asset copy, but it's a downstream of the original engine (and loads the original level files just fine), so the real game.

firasd•about 2 hours ago

Ha fun--works in my regular laptop in Chrome without any CPU/GPU etc spikes

foldr•9 minutes ago

I vibe coded this for exploring levels in the original Deus Ex: https://dxwebview.pages.dev/ (https://github.com/addrummond/dxwebview).

It's a bit janky owing to the vibe coding, but the basic functionality works pretty well. You need the original game data files to use it.

nadermx•about 1 hour ago

And CS: https://play-cs.com

plastic-enjoyer•about 2 hours ago

What a time to be alive

mrtksn•about 2 hours ago

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.

Klonoar•23 minutes ago

I admit that Valve’s approach to Steam on macOS has never made sense to me.

doublerabbit•15 minutes ago

This was more Apple's doing rather than Valve's.

Valve wanted too and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I

Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to suppose games on their platform.

Myst was only few that was exclusive to the Mac, that they then ported to PC.

jillesvangurp•about 1 hour ago

On paper qemu should be able to do this. The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU. Without Apple putting effort into supporting this with e.g. documentation, that's a bit hard. That's also holding back linux support on Apple hardware. But it's a fixable problem that will only get easier as hw gets better and faster over time.

ErroneousBosh•33 minutes ago

> The hard part is hardware acceleration for the GPU

Is it, though?

How Hard Can It Possibly Be to just do a software GL renderer that emulates a mid-2000s Radeon, these days?

account42•8 minutes ago

At what resolution. You're not going to software render 4K120FPS even with 2000s graphics. But you also don't need a software implementation since translating to a host API isn't really any harder than that (and often much easier). And this already exists in Wine.

memoryuns4f3fff•about 2 hours ago

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

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

AzzyHN•about 3 hours ago

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

account42•3 minutes ago

This project seems perfectly congruent with current year industry standards regarding copyright, which are to move fast and lobby for permission later.

crote•about 2 hours ago

Valve already gave Half-Life 2 away for free, and released the source code of the HL1 engine.

Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.

Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.

nba456_•22 minutes ago

>Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.

God, AI keeps making life better than I could've ever imagined!

foldr•7 minutes ago

HL2 is not free: https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/

dminik•about 2 hours ago

GoldSrc (HL1 engine) is very much not open source (or even source available). There's at least one open source remake (which is possibly illegal due to using the SDK) but no official release.

flordaman•about 1 hour ago

No no, you can't steal anything without consequences, only big corperations who are making slop machines(tm) can.

londons_explore•about 3 hours ago

That is up for the copyright owner to enforce or not to enforce.

Until they decide, we can't know if it's illegal or not - who knows, this site might have a license.

KeplerBoy•about 2 hours ago

It's not legal just because the copyright owner doesn't immediately sue you.

simondotau•about 1 hour ago

If a copyright infringement falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound?

rvz•about 2 hours ago

It's quite dangerous to make unsubstantiated comments and assumptions on US copyright law without the proper research.

Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]

They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?

So just say you do not know.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/

Ukv•about 1 hour ago

> just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent

I don't think the parent comment is claiming it's legal, other than the (unlikely) chance that this is licensed, just that it's up to Valve to enforce and not really our concern. A lot of cool things (like the similar https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.

utopiah•about 1 hour ago

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.

account42•5 minutes ago

Sounds like companies should start locking down browsers to disable WebGL, WASM and other similar APIs targeted at apps as opposed to web pages. I would welcome this if it got web developers to stop using more than they actually need.

entropyneur•about 3 hours ago

Whew. Crashed before I sunk my day there.

fuzzy2•32 minutes ago

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

0x0•about 2 hours ago

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

LandenLove•about 3 hours ago

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

ironhaven•about 3 hours ago

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

vladar107•about 2 hours ago

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

antalis•about 2 hours ago

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

ramon156•about 1 hour ago

The blog post mentions that the animation system was disabled, because it caused a lot of issues

othmanosx•about 1 hour ago

What about gaming on a mac?

schappim•about 2 hours ago

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

panza•about 2 hours ago

Yep! http://play-cs.com

GL26•about 1 hour ago

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

pelagicAustral•about 2 hours ago

Ah! Just in time for HL3

el_peaton•about 2 hours ago

Along with Team Fortress 3 and Portal 3 ofc. :)

typon•about 2 hours ago

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

noufalibrahim•16 minutes ago

I was just going to say the same thing. I couldn't afford the rigs needed to run any of these games and never really played them. Now, it's running inside a browser on a laptop.

comprev•about 2 hours ago

Same here - splashed out crazy money upgrading my PC to play HL2.

After that moment I switched to consoles.

iso1631•about 2 hours ago

In a few years todays high end AI models will run on your watch

Of course that assumes we maintain open access to compute that we've enjoyed for the last half century, and I doubt that very much.

Stallman warned about the dangers of software being closed [0] 30 years ago, and the majority of modern IT industry just laugh a that sort of stuff because you can't make a billion dollar startup with that attitude, but I think the restrictions on owning the hardware at all will probably come first.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

bozdemir•about 3 hours ago

What a time to be alive :D

NovaCode37•about 1 hour ago

Looks pretty good

Beijinger•about 3 hours ago

play-cs.com

diimdeep•about 1 hour ago

Cary cool "puck up trashcan" experience, but then game hangs in city square.

gambiting•about 3 hours ago

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

globular-toast•about 2 hours ago

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.

Hamuko•about 2 hours ago

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.

rvz•about 3 hours ago

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

albertgoeswoof•about 3 hours ago

Yup. I was going to finally buy half life 2 today but now I’ve seen this I guess I won’t need to.

Hard times at Valve, I suppose they’ll have to find more children to start gambling with them.

m00dy•about 3 hours ago

looks like you forgot to add /s tag to your comment :swh

fragmede•about 1 hour ago

But what about the people who aren't idiots and can read sarcasm without the /s? I reflexively downvote ever comment I come across with a /s. People aren't idiots until you treat them like one.

linzhangrun•about 2 hours ago

lmao :)

tmountain•about 2 hours ago

Someone has to look out for the big guys! /s

haunter•about 3 hours ago

> this is also illegal

So is unregulated gambling but Valve doesn't care either lol

charcircuit•about 2 hours ago

2 wrongs don't make a right.

haunter•about 2 hours ago

Ah yeah the famously equal acts of pirating a game VS promoting illegal unregulated gambling for millions of people (and that's just the tip of the iceberg).

That's why corporations can get away with everything.

sudo_cowsay•about 3 hours ago

Is that why I can't access the site?

AzzyHN•about 3 hours ago

It works on chromium-based browsers at least

foresto•about 2 hours ago

In which jurisdiction?

hmry•about 2 hours ago

Every signatory of the Berne convention or member of the TRIPS agreement, and most others too.

koolala•about 2 hours ago

legality != morality