There's also https://noclip.website/ which, while not playable, has hundreds of levels from dozens of older games that you can explore freely. Including Half-Life 2, with more accurate rendering than this web port (which seems to be missing many shaders including character eyes).
Fan remake of the levels to avoid asset copy, but it's a downstream of the original engine (and loads the original level files just fine), so the real game.
Interesting, I am not able to play HL2 on Steam because macOS no longer has 32-bit support and Valve never compiled if for 64-bit but here we are, it’s playable on the same OS in the browser.
BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
What's the biggest bottleneck you hit - GPU compute, memory bandwidth, or network latency for asset streaming? Curious how it compares to native WebGPU.
Valve already gave Half-Life 2 away for free, and released the source code of the HL1 engine.
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
It's quite dangerous to make unsubstantiated comments and assumptions on US copyright law without the proper research.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
As much as I dislike webdev stuff, I love the way you can distribute entire programs through WASM. Super cool stuff! For those who are interested, I recommend checking out Godot for exporting games on the web. It's really easy to do and you can host it on Itch.io
Tried it on my M4 iPad Pro and was surprised that it works - to a degree. NPCs (Gman and the citizens on the train) seem to be missing eyes and have no mouth animations. FPS was pretty poor too, and it was ass to use the camera on the trackpad.
I remember saving up for a year to buy the ATI Radeon 9600 XT (I think it was $200 MSRP) so I could play the game on high settings. Now we can play it inside a virtual machine on a crappy laptop. What a journey
And Unreal Tournament: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut
There's also https://noclip.website/ which, while not playable, has hundreds of levels from dozens of older games that you can explore freely. Including Half-Life 2, with more accurate rendering than this web port (which seems to be missing many shaders including character eyes).
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu
Fan remake of the levels to avoid asset copy, but it's a downstream of the original engine (and loads the original level files just fine), so the real game.
BTW IIRC there was some method to convert the 32-bit game binaries to make them run on recent macs. I remember doing it.
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Until they decide, we can't know if it's illegal or not - who knows, this site might have a license.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
So just say you do not know.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
Hard times at Valve, I suppose they’ll have to find more children to start gambling with them.
So is unregulated gambling but Valve doesn't care either lol
After that moment I switched to consoles.