Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbsun | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, I am wondering what are missing in mobile browser before we can completely move these games to web and get rid of native apps? Faster JS? Accelerometer and other censor APIs?

View on HN

Usable 3D APIs for starter.

WebGL 2.0 is at the level of OpenGL ES 3.0 (we are at GL ES 3.2 since years now) and has constraints in place due to security reasons.

WebGL 2.0 compute got a standard update last September, but there are no plans in sight to ever make it out of nightly previews, specially given WebGPU.

WebGPU still remains to be seen when it will be available, and in what form, if ever.

WebAssembly in 2020 is still trying to catch up with what Flash Alchemy allowed for in 2011.

To top this, even if you managed to make a cool 3D Web game in proper framerate, it can run like a dog in the customers browser in spite of their good native gaming experience, because the browser for whatever reason blacklists their GPU model and reverts back to either software rendering or not running at all.

Flash Alchemy was roughly equivalent to emscripten. What you're likely thinking of is Starlet/Stage3D, which, uh, have you used it? Did you seriously write AGAL code? WebGL is a lot more tenable. Not great, but far better.

Nope, I am thinking about Alchemy, as 3D APIs go hand in hand with such kind of infrastructure.

"Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash Player - Unreal Tournament 3" - 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y

We're missing the desire of Apple & Google to make this happen. Apple won't let Safari compete with its app store and Google won't let Chrome compete with its app store.

As examples of this, Safari doesn't even support HTML push notifications: https://caniuse.com/notifications , which would make it near impossible to make an entirely web based messenger app.

I believe most sensors are already available to web apps, but a big burden for games would be storing assets on the user's phone as something like Fortnite takes a few gigabytes even on iOS with lower resolution textures.

Browsers are a rather poor app execution environment thus there’s not much incentive for publishers to go that way, as given the choice the customers would largely prefer a native app to a similar browser-based one.

Somehow caching the gigabytes of cooked data that is a game. Web apps don't have any way to do data management, and even Chrome's cache on desktop regularly corrupts itself on large files.

Bandwidth is likely the largest hurdle.

If they do a phone and a gaming OS I would buy it.

also, I similarly wonder what we are missing for google and apple to force websites to use their payment system and tax the 30% hell out of the entire economy.

And remember, no "sideloading" though brick and mortar stores!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com