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Summer Afternoon – A WebGL Experiment
- jaden 4y agoI'm amazed how well it works on mobile. So smooth!
- epolanski 4y agoDon't be surprised at how powerful modern mobile devices are.
- gofreddygo 4y agoI am surprised especially in contrast to many other "native" apps on my powerful device.
- dorkwood 4y agoThere are a lot of WebGL sites that don’t run nearly as good as this one. It’s not just the device!
- NemoNobody 4y agoMy 2017 PH-1 running vanilla Android 9 played this without a single issue. Not only new phones - feels future to me
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- cush 4y agoThis is delightful. So smooth on ios safari
- ge96 4y agoWow that's great. Nice color palette. Ran on Android Chrome
- honkler 4y agoI saw another player perhaps (with the same hat and clothes as mine). is this a multiplayer thing?
- Sateeshm 4y agoI think it is. I saw 5 people.
- gpderetta 4y agoVery beautiful art style (that matches the evocative title) and works wonderfully on my potato of a phone. Please make something out if this .
- robga 4y agoThe art style reminded me instantly of Alba: A Wildlife Game, available on most platforms.
- NemoNobody 4y agoThis is great - so simple but I played for awhile. Love the Straw Hat I was just checking this on my PH-1 from 2017 and it played very well. I was running around for a bit before I realized how amazing that was. Ran it right from HN
- posterboy 4y agoThis is nice vut not impressuve. We have had Quake Live on the browser years ago.
- parasti 4y agoQuake Live was a browser plugin that you had to install to play the game. This game is built with web APIs, and runs on any device that has a WebGL-capable browser. It's a zero-install, no-setup, click-to-play game in the literal sense, without any marketing hype.
- souvlakee 4y agoFirst webgl without lags.
- 20after4 4y agoVery nicely done. I really like the stylized graphics and performance seems pretty good.
- hrkucuk 4y agoVery soothing somehow. It is interesting to see other players around as well. I wish I could send twitter-like shout messages. I found the sloth secret literally by mistake, that one was pretty difficult
- 123pie123 4y agothis is great the ability to send a message to other players would awesome
- hi_hello 4y agoWonderfully rendered, in all senses
- ozten 4y agoVery cool experience! Firefox. Not sure how to select my audio out device. I think it used the wrong one.
- zengid 4y agoThis is beautiful, and I think I made a friend in there. Amazing that this works on mobile (safari). Any notes on how it was made? Unity?
- sosodev 4y agoSafari got WebGL 2 support not long ago :) the future of web gaming is very bright
- friedman23 4y agoThreejs apparently
- flohofwoe 4y agoThere's a lot of WASM in GUID-named binary blobs though (most of those have one JS file and one WASM file included, some only a JS file). Does three.js make heavy use of WASM and bundle them in blobs with GUID names? PS: yes it appears to be three.js, looking at other three.js demos they also have those blobs with one JS and one WASM file in them. I'm surprised three.js uses so much WASM!
- dm33tri 4y agoI think three.js is pure JavaScript, it may be some physics engine that uses WASM (like Rapier)
- cdaringe 4y agoI enjoyed finding the secrets. My gf said “this person gets up” after finding a specific “rocky” secret
- throw_a_grenade 4y ago[SPOILER AHEAD] On mobile it's very hard. You can't jump and go forward at the same time, and there's radius when you turn, so precise positioning is fiddly.
- bschwindHN 4y agoGotta put that second finger to use while you're running forward!
- throw_a_grenade 4y agoDidn't work, I've checked.
- bschwindHN 4y agoHuh, works for me in mobile safari on a 2016 iPhone SE.
- FpUser 4y agoBeautiful graphics.
- adenozine 4y agoInsanely cool demo. I’m amazed I can open this and it run at 60fps within a ~~second~~ on my iPhone. Crazy the power that I have with it, when it spends most of its time in my pocket or playing music. I wish we could show some of the early computer engineers some of this kind of thing.
- karlshea 4y ago> I wish we could show some of the early computer engineers some of this kind of thing. I often fantasize about this, just knowing even what 10-year-old me would have thought about it.
- Antrikshy 4y agoThe 80s is the perfect sweet spot for my go-back-in-time-and-share-modern-tech fantasies. It's recent enough for people to know about computers but just barely enough that they'd be absolutely blown away.
- bjelkeman-again 4y agoIt crashed the browser or the os on my iPad. I was back to login screen.
- arendtio 4y agoThey would be amazed by what is possible and appalled by the things we do with all that power.
- n1b0m 4y agoI’m curious, how can you tell it runs at 60fps? Is there some debugging that can be turned on?
- slim 4y agomost of early computer engineers are alive and doing well
- picklelo 4y agoThis is awesome the graphics are very relaxing
- Topgamer7 4y agoI'm just stuck in the floor on firefox and can't do anything
- teraflop 4y agoI had the same issue when I tried at first (on Firefox), but I waited a while and when I tried again, it worked correctly and gave me a controllable character. Not sure if something failed to load the first time or what.
- Crespyl 4y agoI was a little surprised, but it also worked fine on FF mobile, after ~15-20 seconds loading.
- diimdeep 4y agoSame, but works in private(no extensions) mode
- kibwen 4y agoI saw a distant figure running straight towards me through the woods and thought this might be one of those secret horror games, until I realized it was multiplayer. :P
- ge96 4y agoyeah I thought it was a hint lol, cool had to watch the motions to realize it wasn't scripted
- jamestimmins 4y agoReally lovely. Reminds me of the Studio Ghibli films.
- myth_drannon 4y agoLooks better than Meta's metaverse.
- troymc 4y agoYeah, the characters have legs!
- andybak 4y agoIf I implemented avatars in social VR I would also avoid legs. No legs is better than bad legs and good legs is very hard to achieve. So the "no legs" thing is the correct design decision in many cases.
- andsoitis 4y ago> No legs is better than bad legs and good legs is very hard to achieve. What do you think of the leg quality in this game?
- andybak 4y agoThat's an entirely different problem to the one faced with VR avatars. You can make in leg position. With VR avatars, you're trying to infer leg movement to the head and hands movement of a human in 3d space.
- robotburrito 4y agoIt does, I love the peaceful vibe it has. But to be fair this is conveying a lot less information about the individual players than Meta does. A "metaverse" is much harder problem than people imagine.
- jojobas 4y agoIt's a non-problem that's very hard to solve indeed.
- 4y ago
- throw101010 4y agoI love the color palette and music, really relaxing and it was a nice surprise to see it is multiplayer Works really well on Firefox for Android too!
- BuckyBeaver 4y agoWorks great on desktop Safari, too!
- ryandrake 4y agoNo sound or music for me on mobile Safari (iPhone) but rendering is smooth.
- jurmous 4y agoI had music on my iPhone in mobile Safari. But the ringer switch had to be on and I had to press the top right sound button.
- hamburglar 4y agoI had sound on iPhone until I unplugged my headphones, then I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- porbelm 4y agoOh my, WebGL has come a long way since the late '90s I think I mean VRML but you know that don't you, you old farts you
- pjmlp 4y agoWebGL is stuck in 2011 hardware capabilities. What matters is what people are able to do with its features, basically something like a PlayStation 3. By the way, I might have some VRML book lost somewhere on my university boxes.
- flohofwoe 4y agoAAA games are way deep into diminishing returns for the last 10 years when it comes to rendering. A 2010 game with good art style can still look great if you run it on a high resolution display, while other games with much more impressive 2010-era rendering technology but poor art style have aged badly. It makes little sense to reduce the quality of games to their rendering technology and 3D API of choice.
- bcrosby95 4y agoI unironically prefer Valheim's graphics to any AAA game I've played. The scenes it sets are just perfect. I really enjoy the art style in the OP too.
- pjmlp 4y agoLooking at its 3D requirements I doubt it would be playable in WebGL 2.0.
- pjmlp 4y agoExcept I am yet to see any Web based game with PlayStation 3 like graphics, or to make it even more clear, Infinity Blade. After a decade of WebGL existence.
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- c_s_guy 4y agoSecret hints: 1. Animal on roof 2. Animal on tree 3. Large object in trees 4. Beach goer 5. Small wooden fence room
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoAnimal on tree has me stuimped, I think I'm looking for a sloth someplace but not seeing it.
- neophyt3 4y agoSloth cats alien ufo some alien objects
- jq-r 4y agoThose alien objects are actually objects from a Zelda game.
- linsomniac 4y agoThanks for the hints, animal on the roof had me stumped.
- spuz 4y agoI couldn't find the animal on the roof until I saw another player and thought "how did they get up there?". Great example of how being multiplayer improves the experience.
- ohthatsnotright 4y agoI was so hoping when I hopped from the railing by the cats to the roof I found a secret :(
- modal-soul 4y agoI made friends with someone else who kept circling around. The look of it reminds me of Boku no Natsuyasumi.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoIt’s very cool. However, it crashed my iPad Safari, the first time I ran it (worked the second time, though).
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoMy Intel i7-4790K is able to run this at 1080p and 30 fps (specifically 60 with drops to 30), on a build of Chromium that has hardware acceleration disabled. I don't know if this is thanks to the speed of the app or Chromium's software renderer or just (semi-)modern CPUs, but I am super impressed. I had no idea you could do something like this without a GPU! Edit: Whoops, I lied! I knew something had to be wrong here, so I checked. GPU Compositing is disabled. However, chrome://gpu reads "WebGL2: Hardware accelerated but at reduced performance" (whatever that means). When I fully disable hardware acceleration, performance dips to something in the range of 1 fps. So, basically what you'd expect, and a lot less interesting!
- ElFitz 4y agoIt runs quite well on a phone too. Impressive.
- losteric 4y agoFlawless on Pixel 4 (Firefox)
- Abishek_Muthian 4y agoOn Mull (Firefox fork in android ) it says Webgl 2 is missing. On Fennec in android it works flawlessly.
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- EarthLaunch 4y agoI looove this. I agree with the other commenters that this has a special feeling. And that the future for web games is bright. (For as long as Google is spearheading features with Chrome.) I guarantee this game wasn't built with Unity: 1) Unity bad for building WebGL games. It does multiple conversions to make a WebGL build. Unity offers live editing in its application, but that doesn't apply to web; whereas modern threejs/babylonjs systems offer hot reloads. 2) And Unity is just unpleasant and bloated generally, for the last few years. Plug for my game[0] if someone wants to see another WebGL experiment (that I devoted 10 years to...better not to ask lol). PS - WebGL supports WebXR, I've been in my world in VR! 0: earth.suncapped.com
- adastra22 4y agoIf you like this, you should probably try out Alba.
- khobragade 4y agoLooks wonderful https://www.albawildlife.com/ https://www.albawildlife.com/
- TomK32 4y agoMy 7-yr-old just played through it again. On the first run I asked her to read out all text loud, you know, calling it educational for a second-year reader :-)
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoWebXR is going to take off behind these advances in WebGL like WebGPU is supported on Chromium 113 in the next few months and there are claims of 3x and higher perf. Its big draw card is supporting desktop/mobile/XR all at the same time so if you can work within its limits then definitely the way to go however you choose to get there (Unity or Three/Babylon or Wonderland or xyz).
- mertens 4y agoSo happy to read in a top comment on HN that the future for web games is bright :-) We've been betting on it for a while[0] and it should only get better with WebGPU. Unity has issues indeed, unfortunately. The developer experience is shit. If you want to mitigate the user experience, you can use our open-source optimization package: https://github.com/CrazyGamesCom/unity-optimizations-package https://github.com/CrazyGamesCom/unity-optimizations-package (feedback welcome!) [0]: https://www.crazygames.com/ https://www.crazygames.com/
- pkdpic 4y agoSeriously beautiful, well done.
- hestefisk 4y agoVery very cool!
- nemo44x 4y agoYeah it’s great. Mix this kind of thing with the advances in AI and we are seeing the beginning of our next tech bull market.
- schaefer 4y agoI’d love to learn more about the tooling used to make this.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- antegamisou 4y agoThis is beautiful! Sprinting is a bit too slow though.
- gl-prod 4y ago> threejs, gsap, svelte and houdini mostly @vlucendo https://twitter.com/vlucendo/status/1615099156451758082 https://twitter.com/vlucendo/status/1615099156451758082
- spacemaiv 4y agoThis is beautiful. Fun challenge: Get on top of the red roof behind the planters.
- karlshea 4y agoThis is the cutest thing ever
- ElFitz 4y agoI wonder. Since this runs in the browser, does it mean that we could dynamically use different assets based on device and bandwidth? Or start with lower res assets and progressively get better ones, like jpeg progressive downloads?
- greggman3 4y agoOf course, why not?
- ElFitz 4y agoNeat! I’ve never done any WebGL so far, hence the question. I’m even more interested now. Thanks!
- nirui 4y agoDon't stop there. You can also dynamically update the game program by sending WASM/JavaScripts via WebSocket/WebTransport. WebGL games will have a bright future. Also, this game is very well designed, I found all 5 secrets and I loved the process :)
- pjmlp 4y agoNo they won't, as native and streaming provide much better tooling and access to modern hardware features. All Flash indie games moved away from the browser, and don't have any reason to come back. Examples like this one are the exception.
- chongli 4y agoYeah. There were so many great indie flash games on sites like Newgrounds. Quite sad that it’s all gone away. I wish flash had been open-sourced rather than just killed off.
- nirui 4y agoA good developer knows how to utilize the features provided by the tools while endure it's limitations. Tooling grow as the ecosystem grow, and modern hardware features don't necessarily give you a good game. There are many good games out there don't rely on modern hardware, and yet they are still fun to play. It eventually comes down to how smart the developers are, not how many modern features gets utilized. Plus, with help of game engines, a game can run on multiple platforms, including both native and WebGL. Some company might be interested in expanding into this territory.
- peteforde 4y agoIs the code posted for this?
- kmos17 4y agowonderful! such elegant simplicity of design and crazy that this can load so fast on a mobile phone browser and is multiplayer too! works flawlessly on firefox on ios Found the ufo :)
- whatgoodisaroad 4y agoThis is clearly much more impressive technically since it runs seamlessly on my browser, but visually and tonally it reminds me of a peaceful game called Alba that I played recently.
- intrasight 4y agoHas the seeds of a place that I'd like to keep visiting. I've already returned twice. First time I visited, I started posting here interesting things I found. But then realized these are secrets that visitors should stumble upon on their own so I deleted those comments. Grow this into a more interesting place and many will come and visit. Or buy beachfront.
- meling 4y agoCrashed both Safari and Chrome on iPad Pro 3rd gen :(
- r2vcap 4y agoWebkit is the only browser engine allowed on iOS. Chrome and Firefox use the same engine as Safari, so blame Safari and Apple. Apple doesn't want browsers to be as powerful as native apps on iOS.
- mwidell 4y agoThe incredible smoothness / high framerate is so soothing :)
- mr_woozy 4y ago[dead]
- 29athrowaway 4y agoPerhaps it's try to recreate this in WebGL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs
- tunnuz 4y agoWhat a lovely atmosphere <3 this is beautiful.
- bluSCALE4 4y agoThis was pretty nice. Went into it blindly, figured it out, then helped someone else find a few things. Felt kinda like a kid for a few minutes.
- Seb-C 4y agoNice, I just followed someone and it helped me find a statue in some kind of ruins. I wonder if it was you :)
- None4U 4y agoThis feels a lot like Alba
- foobarbecue 4y agoIs this multiplayer? Or are the other "people" NPCs? Edit: wow, multiplayer.
- bennyp101 4y agoLove how smooth this is, even on a phone! Really well done, not just from a technical point of view, but aesthetically as well. As I ran through the trees, with the sunlight changing, it brought back some little flashbacks of me doing exactly that when I was that height! Very cool!
- Mikeb85 4y agoRuns very nicely on Android Chrome. Also nice controls. Floating joystick and tap anywhere to jump. And nice art style. It has good vibes for sure.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoReally cool experiment. Runs remarkably well on Safari on M2 Air.
- fruit2020 4y agoCan anyone recommend some chill games like this one, seems like an ok game for a kid to play. I remember the adventure game from the 90s where I was playing a little dog.
- rbits 4y agoThis kinda reminded me of A Short Hike. It's a great game
- Matumio 4y agoTownscaper is pretty chill: https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/ https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/
- jaeh 4y agosky is wonderful: ios: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-children-of-the-light/id1462117269 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-children-of-the-light/id14... android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tgc.sky.android&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tgc.sky.an...
- Macuyiko 4y agoJust played through Lil Gator Game with my 3.5y old and she loved it.
- rvba 4y ago"Where is my water" is really nice, although something else
- TrackerFF 4y agoAs far as graphic and feel goes, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker maybe?
- sh4rks 4y agoWind Waker is nice, but it has a lot of sailing. Breath of the Wild would be a better game if you prefer walking/horse riding.
- nxpnsv 4y agoMy iphone 11 runs this super smooth… even the touch ui is good, i love it!
- chmod775 4y agoThat we could only communicate with each other by excitedly jumping around - and still managed to explore together - reminded me of childhood memories playing with other kids in Sweden as a tourist who didn't speak their language.
- somesortofsystm 4y agoI too have such memories, and even the colour scheme aligns with my memories of Stockholm in the summer .. javla sjuit bolla ..
- kqr 4y agoVaguely reminds me of https://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/index.html https://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/index.html which had a similar idea.
- lonk 4y agoWhere is the fifth secret?
- ikt 4y agoyou found the cats that you have to jump up the rocks next to the house to get to?
- monkeydust 4y agoReally nice. Find it interesting this was posted on HN 4 days ago with no comments now it's top at time of writing. I guess talks to merit of allowing reposts as I would have missed this.
- kqr 4y agoIt may well have entered the second chance pool, rather than been reposted.
- nojs 4y agoThis is magic, and works beautifully on my phone!
- LoganDark 4y ago> Seems like WebGL2 is not supported by you browser Please update it to access the experience. This.. is incorrect. If I go to chrome://gpu (I'm using Chrome on Windows!) it says "WebGL2: Hardware accelerated". I have an RTX 3060. There is no reason this shouldn't work. There's no error in the console for me to go off of, and the source code is packed/obfuscated, so I can't tell what the problem is. I can't tell if it's pre-emptively refusing to run because I'm not on a whitelist, or running into some sort of error.
- qxxx 4y agoit works for me, I also have RTX 3060, if I open chrome://gpu I see this: Canvas: Hardware accelerated Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Disabled Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled Compositing: Hardware accelerated Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled OpenGL: Enabled Rasterization: Hardware accelerated Raw Draw: Disabled Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Video Encode: Hardware accelerated Vulkan: Disabled WebGL: Hardware accelerated WebGL2: Hardware accelerated WebGPU: Hardware accelerated
- anotheryou 4y agoSuper cute. In my firefox I can only jump once though -_-. Clicking out- and inside again let's me do another hop.
- bbbobbb 4y agoOpening this in Brave on an iPad immediately crashed and rebooted the device. I don't think that has ever happened to it.
- kevincox 4y agoMight want to reach out to a security researcher. It could be an exploitable bug.
- fulafel 4y agoSafari also has a bug bounty program so this could be worth $$. At least on the Chrome blog WebGL bugs regularly net people bounties. (Example: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2022/08/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_16.html https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2022/08/stable-channel... - the bountied ANGLE and SwiftShader bugs are WebGL. You don't need to craft exploits at least in Chrome's program, just demo crashes that look concerning)
- numlock86 4y agoAn iOS device crashing and rebooting because of something you open in your browser? Now that's something completely new and unheard of. /s
- omeid2 4y agoIt is indeed very rare. Can you please explain the sarcasm with some examples?
- speleding 4y agoCan confirm, opening it in Safari on iPad consistently crashes the device too.
- buggyipadmettoo 4y agoI made an account just to say me too. (Safari, iPad) never seen that before
- JudithNorah 4y ago[dead]
- lampe3 4y agoThis is how the new Pokemon games should have looked like :D I really like the art style!
- dusted 4y agoThat was a lovely experience, I didn't spend too long find the secrets :)
- surfpel 4y agoThis has a very similar feel to games from thatgamecompany* who made Journey and Flower. Love it! * - https://thatgamecompany.com/ https://thatgamecompany.com/
- lairv 4y agoAfter 15 minutes of trying I managed to reach the roof of the house you can climb, and managed to take a cool screenshot :) https://imgur.com/Vq8i8Yz https://imgur.com/Vq8i8Yz Underrated thing that I haven't seen mentioned is how great the gameplay is, I was able to play without a mouse using only arrows and space bar, and the camera never felt clunky, which is rare for a 3d game. Haven't tried on mobile though
- Sharlin 4y agoIt works pretty great on mobile too!
- dodslaser 4y agoNeat. I got up there too, and after a while someone noticed me and climbed it too. Also, if you jump onto the clothes rack thing on the same building and go as far towards the road as you can you will get stuck in the falling animation.
- lairv 4y agoHaha yeah I also noticed this thing with the clothes rack
- bungil 4y ago[flagged]
- hem777 4y agoNo it wouldn’t.
- hem777 4y agoThis is beautiful! I wanted to talk with the other kids, I wanted to go over that hill. I wanted to feel the end of the day and the sunset. I feel the sea is somewhere near.
- FailMore 4y agoBravo!!
- misterti 4y agoRuns smoothly on Galaxy S8
- ajnin 4y agoFirefox developer edition, Linux - I can't give any input. Moving the mouse pointer moves the camera POV slightly, so that it can end up below the ground, but apart from that no keys or clicks are registered.
- superpope99 4y agoLove this. Reminds me of "Short Trip" https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/ https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/ HN Discussion from 2017 - posted as "Scenic Tram Ride" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324954
- uni_baconcat 4y agoThis is impressive!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ArekDymalski 4y agoThe world and music are so beautiful, relaxing, inviting to explore at your own pace. I'd be happy to play it as a full fledged game.
- alvarlagerlof 4y agoPleasantly surprised how well this runs on my phone.
- danhau 4y agoI've managed to get up on the red roof :) https://imgur.com/a/0uZHhwg https://imgur.com/a/0uZHhwg
- The_SamminAter 4y agoThis runs pretty well on iOS, and looks amazing. Just one bug I found: after running it for a few minutes, the sound started to distort and eventually all sound came out as static. Other than that, it’s quite amazing, and I look forward to poking around on it again on my computer.