I imagine that this, in addition to WebAssembly, could lead in the future to playing more complex games from the browser with the benefit of being platform agnostic (in kind of device, hardware architecture, OS) as long as the browser, the OS, and the hardware is compatible. Am I wrong?
The main problem isn't CPU and GPU performance, those problems had (to some extent) already been solved with asm.js and WebGL, at least for some types of games. It's all the other APIs and the general "feature churn" in browsers which are problematic for games.
Some examples:
- The fullscreen and pointerlock APIs show popup warnings which behave entirely differently between browsers.
- Timer precision has been reduced to around 1ms post-Spectre/Meltdown, and jittered on top. This makes it very hard to avoid microstuttering (we don't even need a high-precision timer, just a way to query the display refresh rate... but guess what, there is no way to query the display refresh rate)
- WebAudio is ... I don't even know what... all we need is simple buffer streaming but we got this monstrosity of a node-based audio API. And the only two ways to do this in WebAudio are either deprecated (ScriptProcessorNode) or not usable without proper threading (audio worklets), and guess what, threading is also disabled or behind HTTP response headers post-Spectre.
- Games need UDP style non-guaranteed networking, but we only get this as a tiny part of WebRTC (DataChannels).
...and the list goes on. In theory there are web APIs useful for gaming, but in practice those APIs have been designed for entirely different and very specific high-level use cases (such as creating an audio synthesizer in a webpage, or creating a video chat solution for browsers), and those rigid high-level APIs are not flexible enough to be reassigned to different use cases (like games). The web needs a "game mode", or better a "DirectX initiative", a set of low level APIs and features similar to WASM and WebGL/WebGPU, and if not designed specifically for games, than at least low-level and generic enough to be useful for games.
This isn't a new idea, see the Extensible Web Manifesto:
It's not just very hard to avoid microstuttering. It's quite literally impossible. And it's not just the timer precision. Chrome's `requestAnimationFrame` actually provides a full precision frame start time, but even if all your page does is render a single solid-color triangle (that alternates between cyan and magenta every frame), you still cannot avoid microstuttering, because the compositor will periodically drop frames. Ironically, the browser engines on mobile phones seem to do better, presumably because of limited multitasking.
Source: I've spent more hours than I care to admit trying to avoid dropped frames in https://sneakysnake.io . To see how bad it remains, check out the triangle in the bottom left corner of https://sneakysnake.io?dev=true . If it looks anything other than grey, then the browser is dropping frames.
> threading is also disabled or behind HTTP response headers post-Spectre
It seems like you've written a long-winded complaint that you have to add a http header (like this[0]) to your server's response? Though it's true that the Spectre stuff broke everything for a little while there (and there are still ergonomics-related teething problems with headers that are being worked on).
> Games need UDP style non-guaranteed networking, but we only get this as a tiny part of WebRTC (DataChannels).
WebRTC DataChannels work fine though? Does it matter that it's a small part of the whole WebRTC spec or that server-client use is a bit of a hack? Either way, WebTransport hits origin trial in Chrome in about a week, and it's specifically designed for UDP-like client-server communication, so the WebRTC approach can be swapped out once that is stable.
Ruffle developer here. A good chunk of our incoming issue volume used to be "how do we configure the WASM mime type" disguised in various "omg it doesn't work, what does this error mean" type issues. This is because we were using WASM's instantiateStreaming function to load our module, which requires valid HTTP headers on the WASM file which most web servers weren't configured to produce. Adding a fallback to a slower WASM load approach that doesn't require a header made all those complaints go away.
In our experience the average webmaster does not know how to configure proper HTTP headers and should not be expected to for a basic web library. So any web API that will not work with the standard web server configurations of Apache, nginx, or IIS is a non-starter for us. (Not to mention that the site isolation headers have non-trivial implications for sites that use iframes...)
That's a fair point. I hope you're involved in the spec discussions around these topics! There's definitely room for improvement in terms of ease of use.
> We've been exploring ways to deploy Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy at scale, as cross-origin isolation requires all subresources to explicitly opt-in. And we have come up with the idea of going in the opposite direction: a new COEP "credentialless" mode that allows loading resources without the CORP header by stripping all their credentials. We are figuring out the details of how it should work, but we hope this will lighten your burden of making sure the subresources are sending the Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy header.
> It seems like you've written a long-winded complaint that you have to add a http header (like this[0]) to your server's response?
So how does this work on Github Pages or other hosting solutions where the user has no control over the web server configuration?
> WebTransport hits origin trial in Chrome in about a week
How long until this shows up in Firefox, and will Safari ever support this before it's deprecated in Chrome again because another better solution shows up?
Spectre called for some drastic measures, and it'll be up to Github/Netlify to decide how they react. Developers who want simple hosting solutions for their little projects will host elsewhere (e.g. replit.com, glitch.com) if they need to. This isn't exactly a massive obstacle if you've set out to build a complex game in the browser. It's just a couple of headers...
>How long until this shows up in Firefox
WebRTC data channels work fine in the mean time. Have you seen games like krunker.io and dotbigbang.com et al? It's perfectly possible to create real-time games in the browser using WebRTC.
> This isn't exactly a massive obstacle if you've set out to build a complex game in the browser.
It is an obstacle (at least a massive annoyance) for library authors (like this: https://github.com/floooh/sokol). Those libraries can be used for extremely simple and small WASM snippets embedded in blog posts (like here: https://floooh.github.io/2019/01/05/wasm-embedding.html), or in "proper" games hosted through "proper" hosting services which allow to set the response headers.
Right now the choice is to either support WASM threading, but tell library users that the library will most likely not work on the hosting solution of their choice, or not support WASM threading and work everywhere. At least to me it's clear that "works everywhere" is better than "it's complicated", so I'll ignore WASM threading until the problem is solved somehow (either most hosting services turn on those response headers, or there's another way to enable threading without requiring control over the web server configuration).
And we’re using WebSockets right now for the networking in dot big bang! Although we’ve talked a lot about moving to WebRTC we’ve not gone as far as doing it yet.
More generally things get a lot simpler if you’re “web first”. It’s a lot easier to just be pragmatic about it and build when you’re not straight jacketed by existing designs reliant on common low level OS APIs.
WebRTC is designed for client to client architecture. We want to use it in a dedicated server architecture. WebRTC is not designed to integrate into kubernetes. Ultimately, this has pushed us to stay on websockets and try to handle TCP congestion. We have theorized a network architecture that could use webrtc in our cluster, but it involves routing data out to a TURN/STUN server and back in, which would cost a lot more due to paying double for egress/ingress.
Overall, WebRTC is a poorly designed protocol which will be quickly obsoleted.
What does WebRTC--or any protocol for that matter--have to do with your container solution? When I develop a protocol now, do I have to "design it to integrate into kubernetes"?! FWIW, WebRTC works great for client-to-server deployment, as using it like that means you don't have to worry at all about the oft-cited peer-to-peer NAT incompatibility issues.
The issues that we ran into were related to the port range that WebRTC attempts to use.
If I understand it correctly, WebRTC requires you to open a range of thousands of ports and kubernetes load balancers are designed to forward individual ports to individual services.
Basically at the end of the day what happened was that the Web people killed Flash, slowed online gaming for 10 years, while nowadays everyone that cares about games moved into native mobile gaming.
It is quite telling that the cloud gaming efforts rather render everything server side with video streaming for the browser than fixing the games APIs on the browser.
