Why is there no Elma webbrowser port yet?

[Xiphias]

If it is possible to play Quake3Arena (QuakeLive) in a webbrowser how come no one has made a browser port for Elma?
I don't have elma on my computers but sometimes I feel like just playing 1 battle, and having the possibility to login to a website and play a level would be great albeit a bit dangerous for us recovering Elma Lifestylers.

I know the demand might not be high for such a port within the Elma scene, but I imagine outsiders would be much more likely to try Elma if this was possible.

I know nothing about webbrowser capabilities for such a port to work, but if QuakeLive is possible, then I'm sure Elma is possible as well.

[Kopaka]

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/actio ... s/play-36s xD

[skint0r]

Possible, sure. There is Web GL, plus Elma is simple enough to run fine just with canvas anyway I guess. The difference is the people behind Quake Live has the source code. Elma source is unavailable. Maybe Elma 2 could be made to work, but I would doubt it's a huge priority. Dunno exactly how EOL works, but I remember there being something about checking checksum or whatever of exe file to be able to connect? So that would not work either.

So as for why... there's that, plus there's barely a handful of people who could even start making this in our scene, who all are busy doing other things, Elma 2 being one of them. So don't hold your breath.

I think the closest you could get now is maybe running EOL on your own computer, and using VNC to connect to it through a browser, but depending on the connection and stuff it would probably be quite a shitty experience.

[skint0r]

Maybe this would work, regarding the VNC thing: https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg-vnc

[Xiphias]

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/actio ... s/play-36s xD

This is very cool! Although it freezes everytime you finish a level.

Possible, sure. There is Web GL, plus Elma is simple enough to run fine just with canvas anyway I guess. The difference is the people behind Quake Live has the source code. Elma source is unavailable.

Few people have already reverse engineered Elma to get the source code. I believe this is what Elma2 is based on.

I think the closest you could get now is maybe running EOL on your own computer, and using VNC to connect to it through a browser, but depending on the connection and stuff it would probably be quite a shitty experience.

For this to work I would have to actually run elma on some computer. It would be just as easy to just run the game directly on my computer.


My thought was more that this is something that could be very useful, both for in-scene people are somewhere and don't have their dedicated elma computer with them but also to promote elma as this cool retro game everyone knew that you can now play online.
I saw there was a project going on to make spying in the browser possible. This is quite similar just the next step

[8-ball]

Not sure if this would work but there is Emscripten which allows 'converting' C++ games to JavaScript. It would likely still need a lot of fiddling with but this could be tried with Elma 2 source?

[Smibu]

I tried some time ago to build Elma 2 with Emscripten. Did not succeed, got some weird compile error (it was CEGUI or some of its dependencies IIRC) that I couldn't figure out why it was happening. Might have been a broken build setup; I didn't put that much time on it. Boost libs did compile successfully. I can try again sometime, but before that I want to finish a couple of other things.

[8-ball]

Sounds great! I'd be interested in further helping with the JS-specific stuff if the build ever happens.

[Smibu]

Tried this again this weekend. Got a lot further than last time; I got the compiler to spit out HTML and JS files: http://i.imgur.com/i4cTGsp.png

But I didn't try to run it because it wouldn't work - the linker complained about a few unresolved symbols; mostly glu* functions and a couple of gl* functions.

It just means Elma 2 rendering code needs to be rewritten in OpenGL ES2, which is what Emscripten supports. It does support "legacy" GL as well to some extent, but it's not possible to mix GLES and legacy GL in the same application. And CEGUI will only build using its GLES2 renderer with Emscripten.

[Bjenn]

Very cool Smibu =)

[gimp]

Smibu I have no idea what you just said. But if you ever need words of encouragement I am always here for you.

[Xiphias]

Very cool. I appreciate the effort Maybe one day you or someone else will manage. Keeping my fingers crossed.