A high school student has ported Half-Life 2 to be playable directly from a browser, allowing you to start playing within seconds without big downloads or installations. I tested this legally dubious project, and it runs surprisingly smoothly, though not without some bugs and missing textures.
After several months of development, including many gradual bug fixes and improvements to gameplay, save files, lighting, physics, and scripting, the end result is still an impressive achievement. The mind behind this project, known as “slqnt”, managed to port this beloved title to run on a browser, with some help from fellow developers. The game runs smoothly in my tests, reporting above 100fps using the in-game “cl_showfps 1” command line, and that’s despite it not running as a native Windows app. Amazingly, the developer also only has five years of coding experience.
That said, my short experience with this port wasn’t smooth sailing. I encountered some hitches when new locations began loading in the background. It seems that the game downloads map and asset files as you advance in the game, which could be bottlenecked by my Internet connection.
On top of this, some aspects of the game were missing, including facial animations and character eye textures, which were replaced by a head sprite, giving them a disturbing look. The developer says the compiler had issues getting these game features to run properly, as they were causing significant performance issues and crashes.
While other games have previously been demonstrated running in browsers, Half-Life 2 features advanced physics, large maps, and a good amount of NPC logic. So, all things considered, this is an achievement.
Now, the elephant in the room you may be wondering about is copyright. The developer didn’t indicate if Valve has authorised this project, which is important, since otherwise it’s likely to be taken down sooner or later. Unlike the similar port for GTA Vice City we covered last year, this one doesn’t seem to ask for proof of ownership for the game, seemingly providing the entire game for free.
Valve has historically been tolerant of fan projects compared to other publishers, but this still looks like an act of piracy or illegal game distribution, which may not go well for the developer.
