FRESH

Hacker News

Show HN: Mystral Native – Run JavaScript games natively with WebGPU (no browser)

49 points by Flux159

by whizzter

2 subcomments

As a gamedev i love it, if you bet on JS for games and need "native" packaging then the platform runtimes has been quite a bit hit-or-miss but with V8 as default (or JSC) then it's sane runtimes with a good WebGPU backend (same as in the browsers).
Only thing "missing" is perhaps a companion builder to emulate the C++ API with a WKWebView bundling setup for iOS.
For those reading, if Apple still disallows JIT:ed code, then a WKWebView might still be the best option in terms of pure JS simulation performance even if the WebView might steal some GPU perf.
What's the story/idea on controls (thin DOM emulation for pointerevents,keyboard,etc?), accelerometers, input-fields and fonts.
As much as I like controlling what I render, having good support for font/input-handling and system inputs is a clear plus of using web tech.

by valorzard

2 subcomments

This is so interesting!! I had a very similar idea! I would love to see if you could port games made with phaser or three js to this engine (though I think anything that involves the DOM is a no go sadly)

by danjl

1 subcomments

Love it. Double bonus points if we could somehow add hardware ray tracing, which is missing from the browser WebGPU implementations. I'll definitely give this a shot with my 3D interactive WebGPU chessboard. A desktop implementation opens up the possibility of publishing on steam and other services which all expect a desktop app.

by auyez

0 subcomment

Great project! I also had similar thoughts when I saw ability to make WebGPU calls in deno. I wonder how performant could games get on this runtime

by rockyj

1 subcomments

Very interesting. It would be great if this works with a "higher" level library like Pixi.js or Phaser.js, that way one could build with ease in JS/TS, using a rich library/ecosystem and still distribute a "native" app (it probably already works with these libs but not sure).

by TazeTSchnitzel

1 subcomments

Very cool! This reminds me of Ejecta, which was something like this for 2D games on iOS, a very long time ago: https://impactjs.com/ejecta

by iddan

0 subcomment