Play Counter-Strike 1.6 in your browser (opens in new tab)

> How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link? Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all.

This is actually one of the major selling points for Cloud Gaming. Although it still has a lot of issues to be adressed before getting into the mainstream, this is exactly what it promises. Just sending your friends an invite link and get them to sign up is a much more pleasant experience than downloading 100+GBs of game files before being able to join the session.

I also enjoy seing browser implementations of popular games. My favorite recent example is the classic version of Minecraft running in the browser [0]. The browser is obviously a much more restrictive environment than a native app, but I can still imagine plenty of useful examples for performant 3D graphics in a browser. After all, Games are often just used as a showcase for the capabilities of new Apis and performance improvements.

[0] https://classic.minecraft.net

> How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link?

That doesn’t work well for games with lots of modern assets.

> Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all.

That is strange, it works on the latest Windows.

> I think browser ports are the only hope that old games have at coming back.

Why? Steam, GoG, DOSBox, Proton, DXVK, emulators, VMs, etc. all give you access to almost every game that has been produced, today.

Many of those have thriving online communities, too.

I don't think that lowering friction is a great thing. A certain amount of easy-to-overcome exclusiveness helps keep a community vibrant.

When I was a kid I heard about a group of hippies that would have parties deep into the desert, far from roads or civilization. They had a "list", and if you were on it you'd get invited to the parties. Long story short, I figured out how to get on the list and one of the coolest things about those parties was how much effort everyone who attended went through to get there, both in however they managed to get invited and how much of a potential ordeal the journey was just to show up. The friends I made there put me on my current life course and now I'm surrounded by great people and a good tribe, which is really hard to find once you finish university. All because I put in the effort to get on the list and attend.

Sure, not making things super easy creates slightly less inclusive communities and they are definitely smaller, but they're longer lasting, have some shared plight to bond around, and are generally of much higher quality. Allowing any old yokel easy access kills community because there are too many tourists

Mouse tracking is clearly broken on Firefox here. The input lag is insance. I wouldn't link this to any of my friends with the intention of getting them to play Counter Strike with me.

Hey, can you send me a link to that Nox port? What a blast from the past - I remember saving up to buy that game as a kid :)

We used to hold game nights at my previous company and we would all play quake on the browser together. No installing, no sharing files, nothing. Just click the link on Slack and you're in. Nothing beats that.

Yeah, enumerating why something sucks is trivial. Anyone can do that about anything. Yet for some reason it's tempting to do it. Maybe because it makes us feel like a critic?

For some reason it takes more effort to see the positives in something or someone, even ourselves.

It's often a good practice to stop and think of the positives of something. Maybe it's not so obvious. Why did someone decide to build it this way? They probably are well aware of the downsides (after all, they're the one who built it) yet they saw some upsides. They must have thought the upsides outweighed the downsides. What were they? The harder that question is to answer, I think the more useful the practice is.

Internet (and HN) discourse would be a lot better if we did more of that.

I know it's a challenge for me -- it's really easy to get stuck in a negative thought loop, especially while spending so much time on social media (incl Twitter, Reddit, and HN) where we like to award ourselves points for being critical.

I agree with you on one level-- I think people on HN are generally overly critical of projects like this which are clearly huge accomplishments and the culmination of tons of effort... But on the flip side, I think it's plenty valid to look at projects like this as case studies into why modern web tooling isn't up to the standards of the tooling of 20 years ago (on much less performant hardware no less). Even within the browser, decades old flash games run circles around their JS contemporaries.

> In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

> Anton Ego

Maybe GP will learn this someday, but based on their replies to you, that day is not today.

Meanwhile, they're raking in the upvotes thanks to their cyniscim, so why change their approach?

Comment OP here

I am an avid gamer who players a couple of hours of Apex Legends and Call of Duty Modern Warfare everyday. And I've been info FPS gaming for 2 decades now.

To play a game released a couple of decades ago and see it take up almost the same amount of resources as the games I mentioned earlier gave me a chuckle.

I commend the developer for his effort though. To make a game like that run on browsers is a mighty impressive effort and it is Uber cool. I don't dispute that even for a second.

GP's comment is a short and non-insightful comment, this usually gets downvoted but for some reason it made it in this thread. I usually call this "driveby feedback" at work.

I think it's a perfectly valid criticism of the ridiculous levels of resource wastage of software today.

This has merits as a form of art, but as something for practical use, I do not think we should be so wasteful with computing power.

For something related, but not so wasteful (and also a form of art), look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

I'm all for web apps, but does CS actually require admin rights?

> disk space

CS just downloaded 185mb of network resources for me to play. I would have thought those resources are stored on my disk, and not just in memory.

> installation time

That 185mb of resources took ~1 minute to download. By the time it had finished, it told me the server was full.

Regardless this is still very impressive.

The first two are trivially solved by portable applications (AppDirs, Application Bundles, AppImage, etc.). Platform independence is only kinda true, as many of these things don't actually function correctly on anything but Chrome, so they effectively target just one platform.

Those are all very minors inconveniences. Installation took a few clicks, disk space is negligible for that category of apps (and if it isn’t re-downloading on each access is a more pressing issue). Only the platform thing matters, yet the exemple you give isn’t convincing given it’s super low market share.

Justifying everything becoming a web app to avoid app stores seems to me a lot like swallowing a spider to catch the fly.

This is a clone, not a port.

The hard part there isn't a browser vs native thing (native apps also generally ship with all of the assets in a front-loaded client) but abstracting your rendering pipeline to handle streaming or incremental LoD over the network.

It's more of challenge of taking the time to add that level of polish.

Kind of like the rare native game, like League of Legends, that will let you play before the entire client is finished downloading. Being a native app didn't give Riot Games that for free, they had to specifically build it for their game. Even in the native game market, it's AAA-level polish for a small fraction of games.

Here's Win95 in a browser: https://win95.ajf.me/

If you haven't seen The Birth & Death of JavaScript, you're in for a treat.

Gimp running in Chrome running inside Firefox

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

> This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost.

This is not even necessarily true. There are zero cost abstractions. Compilers can generate better assembly code than the overwhelming majority of developers.

> The CS pros moving to Valorant are basically doing so because they either can't have a CS career (Brax, perma ban for match fixing; iBuyPower) or haven't been good enough in a while/never were good enough for a T1 CSGO team.

I think it is really early to use this as some sigil for how good the game is or how well it will do as an esport. Of course the first people to move are the ones outside of a current CS contract! Why would you give up your share of multi-million dollar prize pools while the other game is a week and a half old? it isn't necessarily an indictment of Valorant, its just the sensible business choice this early in the game.

I'd like to provide a counter point. As a person coming from Quake 2, I find CS shooting mechanics at the very least annoying. I can't find anything pleasurable in them.

I still played CS but mainly because of the team play it added. Simple, flexible, and enjoyable.

Valorant is already dying. I doubt it will do anything to displace CSGO. If anything the toxic and racist community GabeN has cultivated will do CSGO in before a competitor will best them in gameplay.

I would say it’s still fundamentally different from overwatch in that players who prefer CS-style may not like Overwatch but would like Valorant.

Overwatch is much more abilities-heavy while Valorant is still more aiming heavy.

A kernel level rootkit is a usual form of an anti-cheat software nowadays (BattleEye, EAC).

You can dislike it, you can question whether you can trust such software from a Tencent-owned company, but it doesn’t make Riot’s solution somehow different.

1. Overwhelming majority of the (potential) player base is not "knowledgeable" as per your comment

2. It worked for LoL, which has made something like 10x the money of Dota 2. Valorant doesn't have to be "the best" in its category, as judged by connoiseurs, to win its market.

I've seen Valorant blow up in my little circle of online content/professional gamer types. Personally I haven't taken to it, I think the graphics are not very inspiring and the game play seems derivative of almost every team vs team shooter in the last decade. That being said, marketing means a lot and if they flood the digital airwaves, they might just reach critical mass.

I believe you are wrong , Dota2 was a rip off of LOL.

Interesting you mention the root kit - you realise Steam monitors urls Your machine has visited right? They also didn’t confirm whether or not these are then uploaded to their servers.

There's not a lot of difference in gameplay, but CSGO destroyed the sense of community and enabled toxic players. Prior to CSGO, there was a vibrant community of player-hosted servers, run by clans. The best of them had active admins who would kick/ban cheaters, trolls, and toxic people. It was hard to find good community servers, but once you did, it felt like home. It's much easier to get into a match now, due to the automatic matchmaking and different playstyle and skill grouping options, but the communities are gone. You can still run a private server, but hardly anyone does. I used to be in a half-dozen clans and now I'm in zero.

No one thing, specifically. Maybe it's just a muscle-memory thing, but I think the early 2000's polygonal PC graphics look lends well to knowing about hitboxes, certain techniques like defending against BHoPpers and it's overall response. But, to be fair, I've never played CS:GO on a 240hz monitor with a gaming rig (my laptop manages all low and I still do well when I wanna scrim Dust2 :) but there's something about 1.6 that just feels, almost arcade-y? This could all be nostalgia talking. I love CS:GO, but it is getting a bit dated now, too!

Different style fps's, 1.6 was low latency, the newer versions of basically any fps trade off latency for better graphics and better physics.

If bunny-hopping was eliminated in CS:GO, that might be considered an improvement for some (and not so much for others).

I didn’t expect to see another CSS Ze player, given there’s so few of us now. There’s a good chance we play together! Thousands of hours spent playing and making maps, I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

Seems to be a VR game, so unless VR suddenly gets a lot cheaper and a lot better, Pavlov will never replace CS.

Looking at the first few seconds of the first video on Steam for Pavlov (https://store.steampowered.com/app/555160/Pavlov_VR/) shows a very low-skilled encounter as well. If they are trying to attract CS players, they need to show it's a game that shows skills, not like that.

Hell no. The game is basically becoming some garrys mod hybrid mess.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/496240/Onward/

Onward is way better experience.

HaxBall [1] and WebLiero [2] are two other games with pretty decent WebRTC P2P netcode by the same author.

[1] https://www.haxball.com [2] https://www.webliero.com

That was impressive, on mobile and I was able to just hop in and start playing. Not something I’d play, but just impressed that I was able to so easily

This is not random. Prediction and compression is all GoldSrc original, from leaked sources. WebRTC/WebSocket is HumbleNet.

Krunker is fantastic. I have wasted many hours in that game :)

Amazing experience there with kunker. So snappy. Thanks for sharing.

Do you have any more information on getting around head-of-queue blocking by opening up multiple websocket connections instead of just one? Seems like an interesting solution.

damn krunker is really not bad at all

How good is krunker? Don't have a mouse but maybe I could get one.

Flash had more than just security issues. There were definite limits on complexity.

A great example is the original Binding of Isaac; written in flash, but near the end everything was so precarious that backups had to be made before certain publishing stages because sometimes it would corrupt the files it was trying to build (Due to the complexity.)

Well ignoring those issues, is there a html/websocket "framework" which works like flash did?

AFAIK, "zero code" systems still haven't reached the level of hypercard (the spiritual predecessor to flash) when it comes to being able to define event->action with a mouse, much less expanding them to the full capabilities of flash.

That style of content just disappeared or turned into video only as far as I can tell.

It's been awhile since I took a crack at WebRTC. Do you still need to go through all the peer negotiation even when you are just trying to get to a known server?

What do you mean by "small binary commands"?

Became moderately proficient at Russian thanks to Valve. такая халява.

Last time I checked - Valve has no game servers/entry nodes in Russia.

Western Russia connects to Sweden or Poland. Northern European and Eastern European countries connect through the same nodes.

Connections within Valve network are handled internally (since they can tune it for better latency, etc.) and you don't even know where the actual game server is hosted. So there is always a big mix of players no matter where you are in Europe.

Fun thought: it depends on how much throughput can be handled by Starlink, but Valve could waste some money on it to bring players closer from further away. They already have the dynamic, latency based entry node selection set up. If they hooked up some of the internal network through Starlink, it could be amazing low latency cross-continent gaming. And games like CS:GO and Dota 2 doesn't require too much bandwidth.

It is not indonesia but singapore which is just 0.0017% of asia.

Russia is the last remaining European Colonial Empire with their colonies still part of the original power, mostly thanks to them being geographically together.

Tell that to the Vladivostokians.

I was always told Russia spans two continents.

That's news to me, an European.

It was never difficult to play CS for free, and that's probably the reason for its success. I remember getting into CS because you could play online with basically any Half-life product key and by 2000 you could buy bundles that came with like 3-4 keys.

This site is charging, though.

yeah but you can't play with your friends on steam so... there was never really a point to play on these servers (also cheat)

You're projecting a lot on my comment. I spent most of my youth pirating CS and Unreal Tournament so no I don't care at all if people can do it from the comfort of their browser, besides such old games might as well be in the public domain as far as I'm concerned. I was just surprised that a website like this one managed to operate for more than a few days before getting shutdown for obvious piracy, that's all.

I guess there's precedent for Valve being pretty lenient with that stuff though, after all they embraced the Black Mesa HL remake when most other editors would've ceased-and-desisted it into oblivion.

FYI the creators are actually charging $2/week subscription for this game. Profiting from a cracked software definitely crosses some moral boundaries.

Even after that first time, it takes a good 20-30 seconds to process the files again.

Quake live's "main menu" interface was web based and a NPAPI plugin was used to run native code. When Chrome dropped NPAPI support, Quake Live moved to Steam, using Awesomium for the web interface part. The game is now an unmaintained relic but there still an active community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Implementing_Awesom...

You had to download a plug-in I think

> IIRC it got replaced at some point. The current iteration of Source's netcode doesn't have anything to do with that, though.

Do you have a source (heh) to back that? Lots of the networking configuration cvars from 1.6 are still there in CS:GO and do the same thing. Maybe it was cleaned up but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still mostly the same code.

Client-side anticheats are essentially advanced rootkits, and cannot be implemented in a browser sandbox.

Because it runs in the browser it's trivial to apply client side cheats. For example see through walls, auto aim.

No, ping is as complicated as for any gaming server. You have one central server and many clients connected to that central server. I don't think the game is running somewhere else, it's running directly in the browser, so only ping you care about is from your computer to the central server.

> if you have high ping to the online client itself

that doesn't make sense, you download the client and you run it locally (even if in browser) so there's no notion of client ping here (unlike something like cloud gaming)

haha

No, it seems to contain some leaked SDK and reverse engineered code: https://github.com/FWGS/cs16-client/tree/v1.32 , and to run on https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs .

I paid ~$500 for it, its an average laptop. Lenovo ideapad s340. We’re in 2020, whats an average laptop for this time and age