Half-Life 2 in a Browser

ironhaven

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

LandenLove

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

modeless

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).

Beijinger

play-cs.com

entropyneur

Whew. Crashed before I sunk my day there.

bozdemir

What a time to be alive :D

gambiting

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

typon

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

pelagicAustral

Ah! Just in time for HL3

schappim

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

vladar107

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

0x0

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

Hamuko

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.

mrtksn

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.

globular-toast

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.

memoryuns4f3fff

Here is a link to the blog post since I didn’t see it mentioned https://www.slqnt.dev/blog/hl2-in-web

antalis

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

diimdeep

Cool, but then game hangs in city square.