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[Schrompf]

I, for one, think it's amazing that you can port a custom C++ engine to WebGL/WebASM so seemingly easily. Gives me hope for my personal stuff, should I ever do something productive again.

[Shephf]

Ye, it's really amazing that's so easy to do, and like the render, the physics with all that floating point stuff, even the scripting, like lua virtual machine it's all running in js and it's fast Emscripten folks did an awesome job polishing things to this level

[JobLeonard]

So I've decided to try to make a Web Assembly port of the game, just for fun. And suddenly
everything just worked, like the renderer, physics, lua scripting, even input and audio! You can even
go to options menu and change resolution and that actually works And performance-wise it's pretty good:





Here's a link to the game - https://themission1.vercel.app/

And here's a link to unreleased/unfinished water level - https://themission2.vercel.app/

WAT

That's amazing!

[Shephf]

Ye, IMO emscripten is super good for things like game demos, when someone just wants to check the game out without installing it. But you really don't want to play the game in the browser I guess.

BTW, I wonder how hard would it be to make DOOM 2016 emscripten port I mean WebGL2.0 / OpenGL ES 3.0 does have compute shaders, VAOs, floating point textures, texture arrays, etc. so technically it's possible to run DOOM's clustered forward renderer with all those light / reflection probes and post processing effects. i.e. OpenGL 4.5 -> OpenGL ES 3.0 is possible to some extent, but for DOOM Eternal there's definitely no way because of Vulkan (or it's just super hard).

P.S: There's Doom3 port BTW - https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/ 60fps, fully playable

[oahda]

Welcome back! Very cool

[Shephf]

Welcome back! Very cool

Thanks I'm back but not for long I'm afraid, no time for gamedev...

[Shephf]

So, I've decided that I need to try something new in this game in order to proceed.
I've implemented very basic navmesh, just one area type and offmesh links.
Navmesh agent is working pretty well already. I'm looking into changing the gameplay, I want AI
to control the spider, I also want to make it smart enough to traverse complex level geometry.





It's just that navmesh-based AI is sort of a standard in 3D games, but in 2D side-scrollers almost nobody does it
and I wonder if I'll be able to make it look good. I'll post more progress videos later (I hope)

[oahda]

Looking good! Can't wait to see the spider crawling and hopping about

[Shephf]

It's still very incomplete, but I can already see that this idea will work out well.





Before polishing stuff I want to try one more thing - navmesh the walls and the ceiling, i.e.
it would be cool if the spider could climb to the ceiling and jump off down.
So generally this AI spider != player spider, it'll have far more movement freedom and, well, the laws of
physics will sometimes be violated for him, but I think it's ok.

[JobLeonard]

Players are used to that anyway

I'd rather have that than "stuck in frustrating ways because the AI is dumb"

[Shephf]

Yeap, it's better to just move the AI in a predictable way than obey the physics and have a chance for it to get stuck. After playing hours of DOOM 2016/Eternal I can tell they probably do this too. I mean enemies there move in a very predictable way and they're super stable, they get you wherever you are on a map, most probably they just navigate the navmesh / jumplinks like kinematic bodies and raycast for obstacles or something, i.e. dynamic physics there is probably kinda "fake", but it works well.

[oahda]

Agreed, looks good in the video!

[Schrompf]

Seems to work great, but did I understand this correctly: you want to take away player's direct control and replace it with the spider being controlled indirectly only?

[Shephf]

Yes, I'm thinking about changing gameplay entirely. Don't have anything specific in mind yet. I would like to focus on AI more, like try to make a pretty smart and dangerous enemy and as for the player... well, m.b. the player will not be a spider-bot at all, m.b. he will be just some guy trying to survive in this dangerous world.
The thing is, I want to make gameplay fun and as of current game state, the gameplay... it's just not fun honestly. Like take away all the "black-and-white" art and the spider web and physics and it's just your regular "jump and shoot stuff" platformer.

[Schrompf]

Hm. I see your point. I had fun, though, and I can't really imagine how pointing the spider around is going to make it better.

[Shephf]

Hm, m.b. it's just me who got used to the game too much and can't tell if it's fun or not. I guess I need to think about it...