Minetest in Web Browser?

[garywhite]

Hi,
Recently I have not been able to access Minetest (Parents' Parental Controls setup going a little wrong, having to access through other means), and so I was wondering, would it be possible to create a multiplayer-only version of Minetest that people can access through a web browser? Then it would be able to allow a lot more people to play the game who don't feel comfortable with downloading a program to their PC.

[TARD]

Whatever browser they use, it's probably the most targeted for exploit than any piece of software on their PC. With a few minutes of research and they will learn that a audited open source and sandboxed piece of software should make them the most comfortable. Browser games seem to have died along with Flash. Flash died because it was dangerous. Html5 is supposed to replace flash but Im already hearing bad things about it. Most PC users I know are adding ad and script blockers that would probably break minetest anyways. And for smartphones and tablets I think people use apps to check email, message, game more than they use a browser.

[Byakuren]

Whatever browser they use, it's probably the most targeted for exploit than any piece of software on their PC. With a few minutes of research and they will learn that a audited open source and sandboxed piece of software should make them the most comfortable. Browser games seem to have died along with Flash. Flash died because it was dangerous. Html5 is supposed to replace flash but Im already hearing bad things about it. Most PC users I know are adding ad and script blockers that would probably break minetest anyways. And for smartphones and tablets I think people use apps to check email, message, game more than they use a browser.

People who are using script blockers will know how to turn off the blocking when they want to play the game.

[Morn76]

It might be possible to compile Minetest, Irrlicht, SQLite, etc. for the browser with Emscripten. But frame rate would probably be abysmal because Irrlicht would not use WebGL for 3-D graphics but do all computations on the CPU.

Compiling for the browser is more suited for 2-D games like MAME at this point I think.

[TARD]

It might be possible to compile Minetest, Irrlicht, SQLite, etc. for the browser with Emscripten. But frame rate would probably be abysmal because Irrlicht would not use WebGL for 3-D graphics but do all computations on the CPU.

Compiling for the browser is more suited for 2-D games like MAME at this point I think.

So you would probably have to rewrite it? ILong ago I had fun with this one, movement is like minetest 1st person 3d with item in hand and armor.
http://www.sherwooddungeon.com/home.html

[Morn76]

It might be possible to compile Minetest, Irrlicht, SQLite, etc. for the browser with Emscripten. But frame rate would probably be abysmal because Irrlicht would not use WebGL for 3-D graphics but do all computations on the CPU.

Compiling for the browser is more suited for 2-D games like MAME at this point I think.

So you would probably have to rewrite it? ILong ago I had fun with this one, movement is like minetest 1st person 3d with item in hand and armor.
http://www.sherwooddungeon.com/home.html

Reddit seems to think that voxel.js could be a good starting point for a MT client.

Irrlicht on the other hand does not work with Emscripten according to Reddit; looks like sfan5 already tried that.

Edit: And apparently Three.js cannot load models in DirectX format (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10571860/how-to-load-x-model-in-three-js), so that is a major problem for Minetest entity models.

[TG-MyinaWD]

How about WebGL?

[Morn76]

How about WebGL?

WebGL is the underlying technology that ThreeJS/voxel.js use for display. So doing it in bare WebGL would be even more demanding than using an existing framework.

It looks like ThreeJS has good support for loading animated Collada (.dae) models, so I guess at least the MT player model could be easily converted to that with Blender. Wavefront Object (.obj) files are also supported, but I think they cannot contain animations.