
Devilution – A web port of the original Diablo game - tilt
https://diablo.rivsoft.net/
======
hombre_fatal
What's also amazing is how someone ported Nox to the browser. Similar but more
arena-style game (by Westwood) that was unfortunately overshadowed by Diablo
at the time.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Nox/comments/bkvc0s/nox_in_a_browse...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nox/comments/bkvc0s/nox_in_a_browser_take_2/)

[https://playnox.xyz/](https://playnox.xyz/)

Even multiplayer works. Insane amount of work.

I highly recommend at least trying the campaign (not the "Quest" mode). It's
like a faster Diablo.

It's under active development, and sometimes the initial download can't
complete on my crappy connection.

~~~
kryogen1c
Nox! What a treasure. One of my personal favorites. Its so similar to many
other dungeon crawlers but somehow strikingly unique and unreasonably fun.

~~~
galangalalgol
the abilityo reverse most spells was fun. my favorite was teleporting an enemy
to my teleport marker instead of myself. o courses my marker was in a lava
lake...

------
ksec
_Hello My Friend, Stay awhile and Listen_ :D

But the first question that springs to my mind when I was reading the web
page, what happened to Shareware? 30 days trial.

We used to have games that we could play a little to decide whether we want to
buy it. Now it is like a money bet hoping for the best.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Maybe it's a cultural shift, that is, people can get information about a game
- reviews, etc - a lot more and easier than back then when you depended on
just the right issue of gaming magazines. Alternatively, the best you had was
looking at the back of a game's box to get the gist of it.

But with shareware you often went in blind, especially once CD-ROMs became a
thing (attached to magazines) with dozens if not hundreds of shareware games
and applications. The culture was one of browsing and trying stuff out.

Nowadays it's more about being able to build up hype and brand / name
awareness over time, with peak moments being e.g. the E3 conference. More
recent even is streaming on Twitch and let's plays on youtube, allowing people
to see the game before buying it themselves. And of course there's free-to-
play or low cost games with in game purchases and/or live services.

~~~
mrec
I don't find reviews to be a substitute for demos; there's always a strong
element of "if you like games like this then..."

I pretty much only buy Steam games on sale now, not (just) because I'm a
skinflint, but because I've learned the expensive way that I'll uninstall most
games within half an hour or so or starting them. Even well-reviewed ones.
Even ones that won Game Of The Year.

~~~
c0vfefe
Are you sure you like video games?

~~~
liability
_" Liking video games"_ is like _" liking books"_. Typically people prefer
certain kinds of games or books, and may find any particular example enjoyable
or not.

Nobody questions whether I "like books" when I say _The Lost World_ was a
lackluster sequel to _Jurassic Park_ , right? Because there is no expectation
that somebody who enjoyed one particular book should like _every_ book, even
within the same genre or franchise.

~~~
c0vfefe
I was referring to mrec's behavior of returning _most_ games he buys,
including critically-acclaimed ones. That's not a case of disliking a certain
work, but of either not knowing your own taste or disliking the medium itself.

~~~
liability
I wager you don't like most critically acclaimed books, but that certainly
doesn't mean you dislike books. Rather, it's just a reflection of the fact
that there is such wide variety of books that _anybody_ is unlikely to like
most of them.

~~~
c0vfefe
Sure, but I like most of the critically acclaimed books _that I buy_ , which
is more analogous to mrec's comment.

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waffle_ss
Now someone just needs to port the BoBaFeTT trainer(s) and the anti-hacks,
anti-anti hacks, etc. Can’t wait to see people shooting arrows from their
swords, getting PKed in town (and the town being covered in infinite fire and
portals), level 1 loincloth guys suddenly equipping King's Sword of Haste and
Godly Plate of the Mammoth when a duel starts etc.

~~~
arwineap
Someone in this thread who played diablo!

Do you think the game would have had the same staying power if it was harder
to cheat?

~~~
daeken
I wasn't a Diablo cheater, but I was a Diablo 2 cheater. Frankly, it was what
made the game playable for me; I wasn't cheating to dupe items or anything
like that, but making the damn map functional. It was definitely a huge part
of the staying power of the game, IMO.

~~~
flowardnut
and crazy rare runewords, ubers, grinding for sets, etc. We learned a lot
about planning content for "end game" in that era of gaming.

Diablo 1 had... I don't really remember. What did I do sinking hundreds of
hours into the game?

------
flixic
I'm very happy for every web port. Old games, old OSes emulated, old apps.
Please, port / emulate everything! I've recently bought one of my childhood
games (Pharaoh, released 1999) from GOG and struggled for hours to run it in
Windows without errors and glitches. Eventually had to give up.

I'm quite confident that JavaScript/Web runtime will be sufficiently
maintained for decades to come -- HTML websites from early 2000s run the same
now as they did 20 years ago. The same can't be said for Windows runtimes.

So please, port everything you can to Web. It's the best way to preserve old
stuff.

~~~
Dayshine
> HTML websites from early 2000s run the same now as they did 20 years ago.

Well, apart from the tens of thousands of flash games and videos that are
being killed off as we speak.

~~~
mr-ron
You can still install flash right? So the flash experiences aren't getting
lost necessarily.

Lots of Shockwave Era stuff getting lost though I agree. Also flash games that
require a server backend

~~~
Dayshine
Both Chromium and Firefox will be removing it in 2020.

Once it has been removed, legacy websites hosting flash media won't really be
able to fund themselves, so I imagine in the absence of a large archiving
programme, we'll just lose it all.

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jsd1982
Shareware download produces a 404 message. I don't see it in the github repo
in the public/ [1] folder either. Maybe it was taken down recently?

[1]
[https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb/tree/master/public](https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb/tree/master/public)

~~~
jsd1982
Resolved via work-around:

Simply download
[https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq](https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq)
and drag/drop the file onto the start screen to play.

------
aphextim
Perfect opportunity to plug one of my favorite Diablo 1 mod projects. I am in
no way affiliated with this project, just like the work that was done.

[https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/features](https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/features)

------
friendlybus
Dupe trick still works, this is the good stuff

------
akuji1993
Only prints "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token <" in the console on
Chrome under MacOS.

Edit: Same in Firefox

~~~
danielbln
Works for me, MacOS 10.13.6 and Chrome 75.0.3770.100.

~~~
akuji1993
MacOS 10.14.3 and Chrome 75.0.3770.142 here. Not sure what's the issue.

~~~
ModernMech
I'm getting the error on Windows. Chrome 76.0.3809.87, Firefox 68.0.1, and
Edge.

------
wazoox
This version fails on a JS error for me, but this one works:
[https://sergi4ua.pp.ua/diabloweb/](https://sergi4ua.pp.ua/diabloweb/)

------
baud147258
I'm really tempted to launch this. But I'm in an open office, so no going to
happen right now

~~~
agumonkey
You have to find a technical basis for it. Like inspecting new reverse
engineering strategies.

~~~
baud147258
I like this idea, but I'm not sure it's going to fly here. And reverse
engineering is way out of the scope of our work. Oh well it can wait this
evening.

~~~
icxa
Wanna come work for us? We don't care if you have a game open on your laptop,
just that you get your work done.

~~~
santafe
I don't play games and i am proud of my work, but i pretty like the mentality
of your workplace.

~~~
icxa
You know, I am surprised I am saying this, but I think I do too.

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viraptor
I can't find a description unfortunately - is this done via emscripten, or
some new wasm magic, or something else?

~~~
IshKebab
Looks like a wasm compilation of Devilution, which is a decompiled / reverse
engineered version of the original game (they left debug symbols in in some
releases apparently).

It definitely violates their copyright if you were wondering. I doubt they
care though.

------
Marny
Doesn't work on Linux Manjaro, tried using both Firefox (68.0.1) and Chromium
(75.0.3770.142)

~~~
ololobus
On my Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and FF 67.0.1 it have launched fine after a second try,
while the first one just froze

------
donatj
Silly question, if we can port this to web could we port it to Mac?

~~~
adambowles
Run it in an Electron wrapper?

~~~
pysxul
genius

------
cronix
Clicked on the "Play Shareware" button and received a pretty message in a red
box: "Request failed with status code 404." That was fun.

------
sandGorgon
I will pay good money for System Shock 2 on the browser!

------
remedy
Request failed, error code 404. Did we kill it boys?!

~~~
avallach
It's some bug - tries to load
[https://d07riv.github.io/spawn.mpq](https://d07riv.github.io/spawn.mpq) while
actual working url is
[https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq](https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/spawn.mpq)

------
syphilis2
For some reason this only works for me if I'm not using a Private tab in
Firefox.

------
bewilderbeast
Better than this only letting us download the savegames!

------
nihil75
Works better than on Wine :D (nearly)

------
psychoslave
Ahh fresh meat!

~~~
minikomi
Still vividly remember the first time I met this bloodthirsty bugger!

------
pmlnr
hugged to death?

------
zettacircl
Super nice

~~~
zettacircl
I only have a concern about how this works : Is it a client-side computation
of the loaded file OR a livestream of the game with only a check on the
uploaded-file to verify if no copyright enforcement is bypassed ?

~~~
nullsmack
It's running in your browser on your computer.

