

Show HN: I ported an XBox Live Indie Game to HTML5 in 2 days. - kevingadd
http://www.luminance.org/blog/code/2012/04/14/bytown-lumberjack-html5-behind-the-scenes
Site seems to be getting hammered, so here's a direct link to the demo:
http://hildr.luminance.org/Lumberjack/Lumberjack.html
======
soup10
Sigh, reading about javascript hacks reminds me how horrible the application
development environment for browsers is. Web browsers are fundamentally not
designed to enable the development of complex modern applications. That needs
to change if web-apps are the future.

~~~
hiker
I didn't see anything horrible being said about the development for browsers.
The problems were mostly XNA functionalities that he hadn't implemented in his
XNA to html5 converter.

~~~
soup10
These kinds of sprite based games have been around for decades and used to be
developed on hardware orders of magnitude less powerful. The fact that such a
thing would ever have performance problems on modern hardware is a joke and
shows how backwards web development is.

~~~
mathgladiator
I like to think that web development with all these new "features" enable
people a nice playground to get hooked. While I'm disappointed that the there
is no easy "mode 13" to get started with fun graphics programming, I'm
optimistic that a platform is getting built that enables people to iterate on
making things fun that will then drive people to go deeper in the stack.

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jamesmoss
Cached version here:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OT6g2bc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OT6g2bcmll0J:www.luminance.org/blog/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

~~~
kevingadd
Sorry about that, despite having CloudFlare caching in front of it, the web
server completely fell over. It should be redirecting to a working mirror now.

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tga
Awesome technology, thanks!

Crashed my Firefox and in Chrome it clips and moves worse than similar games
on my 133MHz machine back in the day.

Now can you port it to pure CSS? How about ASCII art in streaming JSON?

i5/4GB MacBook Air

~~~
manveru
9fps here on i7 with chrome, almost as fast as minecraft :)

~~~
RossM
Strange, my little 2.4 Core Duo was fine with it (~30fps) and typically does
very badly with these games. For contrast Minecraft can cause this laptop to
overheat and shut down if not using an additional cooling stand. Perhaps I
don't need to upgrade after all!

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ralfd
Small nitpick: I would differentiate between HTML5 and WebGL and would
describe this as a WebGL game.

That said I died two times in level 3.

~~~
kevingadd
It doesn't require WebGL. If you only have Canvas, it'll use Canvas. It works
in IE9.

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sixcorners
I have no idea what do do with those rock throwing people.

The masked person bugged out and attacked me with no delay between his attacks
- there was just a buzz of the sound effect being played and my character
being taken from half health to 0.

~~~
sawyer
Haha same here regarding the rock throwers - they should definitely stagger
when heavy hit or something.

Technically the port was flawless for me, performance was good on 2.2GHz i7
Macbook Pro / Chrome 18.0.

edit: The unlock full version button didn't work for me (not sure if that's a
technical issue or deliberate because it's not implemented yet.)

~~~
kevingadd
The unlock link opens a popup, so that probably got blocked by your browser.

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tferris
Awesome port und JS/browser/canvas/webgl tech demo.

I think the gameplay is ok for a casual game (kind of doubledragon style and
fun) but the overall style, the topic, the enemies, the beard, the story is
not on par with the tech

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jackds
Do you think it is possible to do this in a generic fashion, or would you have
to port games one at a time?

~~~
kevingadd
If you had a generic implementation of all the libraries, you could probably
do this automatically, but having the game source code and doing some tuning
produces much better results.

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gren
It seems not to work on Linux.

~~~
i80and
Works fine here: Arch x86_64, Chromium 18.0.1025.142, Radeon 4850 w/
xf86-video-ati.

~~~
jbsilva
Didn't work here. Arch x86_64, Chromium 18.0.1025.151, Intel Mobile 4.

Even starting with `chromium --enable-webgl --ignore-gpu-blacklist`.

Worked fine on Windows though. Good job porting it to the Web, very funny game
:)

~~~
kevingadd
If you clear your cache and try it again it might work now. I improved the
handling of busted WebGL implementations.

