Comment by MisterMunchkin

7 hours ago

Intriguing, I wonder how far you could go with turning games into websites.

Like could total war become a browser game?

Definitely, TW can "cheat" a lot with using sprites/very low LOD at distance, only streaming the corresponding units on battle load, and it's turn-based so performance isn't critical. Although obviously you won't be doing those 50000 unit battles on the web.

Off-topic sidenote: what's with all these new projects targeting WASM instead of native, even if packaged for desktop anyway?

Probably. There have been dozens of examples of taking old games (Crazy Taxi, Super Monkey Ball, Quake, etc) and making WASM browser equivalents using AI to decompile them just on "Show HN" alone.

They often ship the original assets in a somewhat brazen disregard for basic copyright law even when the games are still for sale on places like GOG though.

Last time I gave that a try (without LLM assistance though) it was really hard as games DirectX calls cannot simply be glued to WebGL so performance was bad.