[fidotron]

But you absolutely could do Infinity Blade. No one does because it's not worth the effort. (I would argue this was true on iOS too - the games that made money did not look like Infinity Blade).

That recent Marble Madness a like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212644 was a far better fit for the audience on the web, and is not technically unimpressive, considering how smooth and responsive it is, along with the image quality.

And I don't have the same amount of assets, but in terms of rendering features this is more than Infinity Blade: https://luduxia.com/whichwayround/

[pjmlp]

Being worth the effort or not, doesn't change the fact it isn't available.

That recent example, was designed for desktop, for example, lacking gyro use, and doesn't respond well to touch.

That demo looks more like a PS2 kind of thing, 2000 technology.

[fidotron]

I suggest you go and look at youtube videos of Infinity Blade, because that doesn't use physical lighting models or even have real time shadowing of any kind. It is all just big textures covering 90% of the screen.

You have very serious rose tinted spectacles.

[pjmlp]

I know how it was, and yet regardless of your glasses remark, where are all those great WebGL 2.0 games?

All really impressive rendering taking place on the browser are ShaderToy samples and demoscene competition entries.

[fidotron]

> where are all those great WebGL 2.0 games?

That is my point: there isn’t a technological barrier. It is a business one.

If you made Infinity Blade and put it on the web today what would you get in return for your efforts? Complaints about how it runs better on newer devices than some six year old low end Android running Firefox, and people trying to hack it to change the assets and repackage it on crazygames.

You definitely would not recover your dev cost.

[pjmlp]

It is a technology barrier as well, because browsers don't provide the tooling native APIs do.

Starting by providing the mechanisms to actually control the GPU, work around possible driver issues, the lack of debugging tools, no ways to actually fit into the browser sandbox PlayStation 2, XBox 360 and Dreamcast class games, let alone anything more modern.

It is a black box regarding user and developer experience alike.

[fidotron]

You just ignore all contradictory evidence because you don’t understand as much as you think, and have just a superficial grasp of what you are looking at, while having a very nostalgic view of the past.

I am not saying you will get dx12 level games in a browser, certainly not on a phone browser, but your concept of what you are looking at and the real limitations are completely off.

To be honest you come off as stunningly offensive in the process on this subject, but I know you enough from other areas to know you are far from stupid.

The web environment today is nothing like as hard to work with as the Android NDK was in the early years. Source: I led the tech side at EA doing this, among other things.