[iercan]

Cool project, when you add multiplayer to a simple game without any game engine and want to actually do it right (CSP, interpolation, lag compensation) it gets technical really fast

I spent months trying to make a CS like in Three.js, then I was wondering myself if it was actually worth it

I could just have used a random game engine that can export to WebGL with wasm even if the first loading was bigger, people wouldn't even notice nowadays

WebGPU is coming out if I'm correct, I wonder how good will web games run now

[ironbound]

Could check this out https://github.com/hexops/mach-gpu

[charcircuit]

That's WASM based which puts it at a disadvantage to a javascript based renderer.

[peterashford]

Really? My understanding was that WASM support was good these days. And performance is a key issue with games

[charcircuit]

JavaScript will typically have better performance than WASM. WASM is good for porting existing software to the web. So if you have tens thousands of engineering hours dumped into some game engine that engine can be brought to the web instead of having to duplicate that work with a rewrite. Using javascript apis from WASM isn't possible and requires you to do extra copies. Yes, there are optimizations that browsers can do, but it's game of catch up with the performance of javascript. Or if you want to share code between a native version of the game and the web version WASM may be good. Performance should not be the reason you pick WASM.

[flohofwoe]

> JavaScript will typically have better performance than WASM.

That's a very - erm - interesting opinion which I haven't seen elsewhere yet ;)

IME, asm.js can achieve similar performance as WASM, but not 'idiomatic' JS.

Calls from WASM into JS are fast nowadays, but they are still an optimization barrier, doing this frequently (e.g. hundreds-of-thousands times per frame) is neither recommended, nor needed (and that's about the only situation where I can imagine that pure JS might outperform WASM - and IIRC I've seen some poorly built benchmarks which showed exactly this and which then claimed that "JS is faster than WASM").

(to be clear: JS and WASM performance is closer than most people think, but JS consistently outperforming WASM is the same sort of myth like "Java is faster than C++ because a JIT has more optimization opportunities" - that might be true in theory, but not in the real world outside some fabricated benchmarks).

[peterashford]

“Preliminary results show that WebAssembly, while still in its infancy, is starting to already outperform JavaScript, with much more room to grow,”

https://thenewstack.io/javascript-vs-wasm-which-is-more-ener...

[charcircuit]

I would like to see this done with JavaScript that is an actual game or application. A gameboy emulator is a virtual machine and is not heavy on IPC with the DOM. Measuring a C++ program compiled into JavaScript (C virtual machine) doesn't seem representative either.

The paper more shows that if you are building a virtual machine in the browser you should use WASM. I agree that is a sensible choice.