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by paradust 1344 days ago
There is definitely a tremendous amount of work going into emscripten/wasm. Minetest is multi-threaded, and so relies on SharedArrayBuffer which only became available in 2020.

The UX issues do seem to be stubbornly persistent though. I ran into the same issues long ago porting games with NaCl and asm.js. I'm not sure what is preventing progress there.
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satoshinm 1344 days ago
I sympathize with the persistent UX issues with web-based voxel engines. I think what is really needed is a UI/UX expert (unfortunately not me) willing to push forward and drive fixes across the entire stack: the game engine, Emscripten, and even investigating and submitting fixes/enhancements to web browsers - owning the complete experience.

For what it's worth, when porting NetCraft I did make an effort to isolate, fix and upstream various UX fixes to Emscripten:

https://github.com/satoshinm/emglfwbugs

with _some_ success; the developers of Emscripten are happy to accept pull requests. But I agree there's a lot of papercuts, and tracking down each of the usability nits could essentially be a full-time job...

For the keybinding problem, I've found using backquote/tilde key for escape can sufficiently workaround the un-interceptable escape key. It also works well on mobile browsers without escape keys.

But the problems with multi-gigabyte world storage, multi-threaded networking, SharedArrayBuffer, may require more invasive architectural changes. At this point, maybe a rewrite focused on web support from the beginning would easier than a port? But _a lot_ of work was put into Minetest over the years, it is great having the library of mods already developed for Minetest, available on the web. Although the same could be said for Minecraft itself.

In any case, thank you for your work porting Minetest to the web. I appreciate it moving the needle in the "web-based Minecraft clone" niche. Even if it may not the be all to end all, hopefully the UX blockers can be resolved, fit and finish, if not in Minetest itself maybe it will inspire others to create something anew with lessons learned from your port. One step closer to the metaverse.

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mysterydip 1344 days ago
Two of the browsers are owned by the same companies that control two of the walled-garden app stores. The better the UX is for web apps, the less need people have to jump through app store hoops.
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