App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by thot_experiment on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @03:02PM (#42561373)

Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. (though I think my broader point about cross platform support unfortunately still stands, I personally don't care about supporting iOS on my side projects and I'm excited to mess with this)

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by chris_pie on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @07:32PM (#42562972)

Support is getting there on the browsers' side, but you need a backend that supports HTTP3+WebTransport - barely any out there

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by thot_experiment on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @08:23PM (#42563204)

Yup, as I have found out over the last 5 hours. I managed to get a handshake but it's nowhere near the convenience of something like WebSockets. The security circus you have to go through to get even a handshake working is absolutely absurd, all sorts of extremely poorly documented certificate requirements and you'll be lucky to get an error message that helps you in any way. I'm getting ready to give up for the day, I will definitely make a top level HN post if I get a solution working and documented.

Meanwhile https://github.com/achingbrain/webtransport-echo-server this is the best we have for a minimal working node example.

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by chris_pie on Thursday January 02, 2025 @07:22PM (#42580637)

Surprisingly, socket.io supports WebTransport: https://socket.io/get-started/webtransport

The guys at Colyseus (a JS library for multiplayer games netcode) also added support, in a preview version for now.

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by wruza on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @05:09AM (#42565098)

I wasn't aware this had more or less landed.

That’s usually a sign nobody uses it because it has at least one large issue. Personally I stopped falling for “there’s now X” advices long ago because if it worked, it would already be mainstream very much heard of by everyone. Sorry for your five hours.

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by thot_experiment on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @12:05PM (#42567321)

I disagree at least a little bit, the fact that there's support on the browser side is much much more important than support on the server. I can write a server of arbitrary complexity given enough time, the scope of the problem is now one that I can fix.

I also found the following in my research yesterday, which looks like a very promising set of abstractions for WebRTC data channels.

https://github.com/geckosio/geckos.io

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by diggan on Thursday January 02, 2025 @01:09PM (#42576944)

> Personally I stopped falling for “there’s now X” advices long ago because if it worked, it would already be mainstream very much heard of by everyone

So you just never use anything new, always stuck with what has been? Because everything starts with just one person using it, then two, then four and so on, things can't just be popular from day 0.

I'd agree with that chasing the latest fads (no matter the popularity) is a fools errand, and you need to look beyond vanity metrics to evaluate if something is useful or not. Sometimes that means trying things and sometimes even making a hard bet on something that hasn't been demonstrated "right" yet.

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Re:App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) by wruza on Friday January 03, 2025 @11:25PM (#42592398)

Comments have too low credibility on average. If a new thing is worth learning about, it hits frontpage eventually with an exploratory post.

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