Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser

100 points ilreb 1 hour ago 72 comments

NSUserDefaults 1 hour ago | parent

Safe rocket jumping? Unlikely.

shoobiedoo 30 minutes ago | parent

It's much safer now that it's written in rust

.... /s, if it needed to be said

vintermann 24 minutes ago | parent

I remember seeing the QuakeC line of code that halved self-damage from rockets. It enabled rocket jumping, but it also made the rocket launcher a much, much better close quarters deathmatch weapon than in Doom, so I thought it was a bit lame.

Panzerschrek 1 hour ago | parent

How? Was it a LLM-assisted rewrite?

schleck8 1 hour ago | parent

Naturally

NooneAtAll3 38 minutes ago | parent

who's on first?

readthenotes1 19 minutes ago | parent

That's the man's name

tw1984 1 hour ago | parent

probably done completely by LLM

aizk 46 minutes ago | parent

Mindboggling that people used to do this by hand.

rvz 35 minutes ago | parent

Of course it was.

hn_submit 21 minutes ago | parent

No one does any porting by hand anymore. Without LLMs this port would never have happened.

CBLT 1 hour ago | parent

Damn, no results when I grep for 0x5f3759df in the source[0].

[0] https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp

airesQ 49 minutes ago | parent

That's for quake 3, the fast inverse square root was not present in quake 1.

onion2k 1 hour ago | parent

Code lives here - https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp (SRP stands for 'slop rust port'.)

I think 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is the phrase for something like this. It's the confluence of browser rendering, WASM, Rust, and LLMs. For me it's less a demo of what AI can do, and more a showcase of the human effort from the past few decades on the parts that needed to fall into place for an LLM to come in at the (relatively speaking) last second and claim a win. Sure, an LLM did the port from C to Rust, but think of all the things needed for it to all work. That's pretty damn amazing, and it wasn't done with AI.

pixelpoet 50 minutes ago | parent

The port to Rust was superfluous though, could've gone directly from C to wasm. But then you miss out being able to say Rust Rust Rust...

flowerthoughts 59 minutes ago | parent

That's darn nice. I didn't even have to push the turbo button to be able to run it on my phone.

I wholeheartedly bless this slop.

Found the repo in the Reddit post:

https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp

https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/1x1ch14/quake_srp_sl...

koala_man 57 minutes ago | parent

I would never have imagined a phone web browser capable of this in 1996 between playing Quake and testing out the hot new JavaScript powered mouse rollover image effects in Netscape Navigator 2.0

aroman 53 minutes ago | parent

Oh my god, and the author even supplied a "proof"[0] visual diff harness... that it replicates the original game pixel for pixel.

Just the cherry on top of great demonstration of our collective new superpower: asking computers to do something we can describe how to do, but would (probably) never take the time to do ourselves.

[0] https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp/tree/main/or...

ChickeNES 50 minutes ago | parent

tbh I thought this was a commonly used technique even prior to LLMs? I know I've been using it extensively myself, but I was inspired by Dolphin's extensive visual CI system.

aroman 47 minutes ago | parent

If it is common in the world of video game porting, that just shows my ignorance. I'm familiar with visual diffs in CI for e.g. web development (comparing a static component), but to do that to compare frames over time in a video game/3D environment is new to me.

There are so many more degrees of freedom, which I can see Claude handled... mipmaps, subtle differences in lighting/positioning/compositing etc.

koito17 43 minutes ago | parent

Even then, visual diffs were pretty flakey for web development, because one's OS and browser choice would slightly alter the exact pixels blitted to the screen. At least this was the case for the tests that would simply match pixels instead of computing a sort of visual hash.

It's also partly why some people preferred snapshot tests that compared the DOM tree instead, though that was brittle in other ways (e.g. tests would break if an application's frontend used a major UI library and an update to the library permuted the order of classes in some part of the HTML).

tnolet 30 minutes ago | parent

For web UI tests this is mainly solved, at least when using Playwright. It allows setting thresholds, percentages and some other config items to allow some small differences in pixels. https://playwright.dev/docs/test-snapshots#options

King-Aaron 40 minutes ago | parent

Yeah cool.

How long before the same thing is done to like, banking back ends? Wallstreet proprietary software? Amazons logistics and distribution systems?

It seems like we might be weeks/days/hours before a situation where someone back engineers and spoofs a system so pivotal to modern human society that the plug needs to be pulled.

brobdingnagians 29 minutes ago | parent

If someone recreates Amazon's logistics and distribution systems they could try to compete with Amazon? But they'd also need the connections, distributors, transportation, etc. same with banking software, you need capital to be a bank not just software, and if they have the capital then the technology is working we intended making it easier to make new things and innovate, or at least just compete?

dyauspitr 28 minutes ago | parent

Or they can just take your money and not send out anything.

Alternatively, you just act as a middleman drop shipper and slightly raise the price more than Amazon’s and skim the difference. It might be a while before they find out.

King-Aaron 22 minutes ago | parent

Yep. On a small scale, you could skim money off transactions. On a large scale, you could break global distribution and logistics chains.

pjmlp 18 minutes ago | parent

Example, parking places with QR codes for paying webapps.

Currently a plague in some European countries.

It looks like the real site, and you pay twice, in the fake app, and later the police.

King-Aaron 26 minutes ago | parent

No, I am not talking about "taking over" companies and trying to emulate them and do business yourself. You just need to be able to break trust in the api calls and no one knows if a purchase order or transaction is legitimate.

Obviously you need to have access to the keys, BUT I don't see this as a dealbreaker anymore because you just get your agents to go and find them.

hypfer 28 minutes ago | parent

I mean some people (me included) have been begging society to pull that plug since over 10 years now.

The plug being "the cloud" and "hooking everything up to the same internet".

These confusion attacks can only confuse people, because critical systems can exist in the same space where entertainment systems and all other categories of systems live. This was wrong even before LLMs.

brobdingnagians 26 minutes ago | parent

The visual diff harness was probably how they got rid of a lot of visual bugs, just tell the LLM to keep going until the pixels match exactly as the verification criteria

nitwit005 23 minutes ago | parent

Using pixel data might be unusual, but anyone porting a game with a replay feature is going to realize it's an easy way to compare implementations.

maxyurk 22 minutes ago | parent

I suspect it's inspired by gbaeval. Both have the "oracle" and other similarities. https://gbaeval.com/

pjmlp 21 minutes ago | parent

Imagine the power of this magic superpower in the hands of business owners....

cush 52 minutes ago | parent

It's so smooth

pixelpoet 49 minutes ago | parent

It was smooth on a 90 MHz Pentium1 from 1996

dr_hooo 30 minutes ago | parent

Mr moneybags over here... True, but for mere mortals that was a pretty high bar. Speaking from experience from fighting a 486DX2-80

Marazan 19 minutes ago | parent

Someone had their resolution set to higher than a postage stamp I see.

pixelpoet 17 minutes ago | parent

What resolution is a postage stamp?

sergiotapia 49 minutes ago | parent

We're in a renaissance, every day more and more games are just playable in browser: https://x.com/RadiantOpti/status/2108068632991256995

You can play Half Life right now, with one click.

franze 48 minutes ago | parent

ok this beats my doom minesweaper mashup [1] by far

[1] https://dreadsweeper.franzai.com/

fragmede 35 minutes ago | parent

Hah! That's great!

aizk 43 minutes ago | parent

This may sound funny but I feel games would lose a lot of fun if they were all written in rust and had classes of bugs just not available to them. For better or for worse quirks and bugs in games have shaped how people approach games, and also have given games charm for decades.

kibwen 29 minutes ago | parent

Fortunately for gamers, Rust doesn't do anything to stop physics engines from going haywire or preventing players from clipping out of bounds. A Mario 64 written in Rust still has parallel universes (well, assuming that you translated the out-of-bounds float-to-short cast as a modulo, which is actually UB in the C implementation).

anonymous908213 7 minutes ago | parent

Rust does, however, kill Missingno. No thanks.

snemvalts 20 minutes ago | parent

Rust only prevents types of bugs where the game crashes because of invalid memory access, or exploits.

lifeisloving 4 minutes ago | parent

Since when are Rust programs unexploitable..

DylanMerigaud 35 minutes ago | parent

Clean launch, good luck!

dwroberts 29 minutes ago | parent

‘Safe rust’ just being used to mean ‘no unsafe’ is kind of a shallow understanding of the language. You can write code without unsafe that is not really ideal at all eg abusing vector/slice indexing to create a kind of interior mutability that the borrow checker is blind to. Which as a C port I’m going to guess it probably ends up doing

combobyte 7 minutes ago | parent

Almost hard to believe that someone using an LLM to mindlessly migrate software from one language to another for no practical reason at all would have a shallow understanding of those languages...

iwassayinbourns 28 minutes ago | parent

This is cool. Do Quake 3 next.

rvz 22 minutes ago | parent

Another slop project highly likely to be abandoned in about a month.

parasti 22 minutes ago | parent

I spent five years on and off porting Neverball to the web by hand and waited for the perfect moment to announce it while tweaking the UX.

Fucking missed it.

https://play.neverball.org/

hn_submit 19 minutes ago | parent

Are hordes of developers now going to port all sorts of open-source software to Rust using LLMs and passing it off as their own work?

I don't see any need for this. Rust is brilliant but the Quake C++ code was already more or less bug-free.

IshKebab 17 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I agree. I love Rust and Quake is cool, but this is a trivial project for an LLM, and kind of pointless.

It would have been impressive before LLMs, but now? Who cares? Why is this here?

hypfer 15 minutes ago | parent

I suppose it will fizzle out in a few weeks.

What this exploits is the mental shortcut of "rust = good", which might be a good thing, as that was always wrong. But now it is being pushed to its breaking point so that that idea will eventually collapse.

Accelerationalism on a micro scale, basically.

AI keeps breaking things that were broken before like this constantly. It's the great cleanup of old bullshit. (Unfortunately through even more bullshit, but at least there is a silver lining)

lifeisloving 8 minutes ago | parent

Its been like 3 months of this.

hypfer 6 minutes ago | parent

I mean arguably, it has been [claude, when did chatGPT launch and when did we get toolcalls? Subtract from current date] of this.

But "this" has been shapeshifting somewhat constantly. We're dynamically crossfading from one dysfunction being blown up to the next.

King-Aaron 15 minutes ago | parent

Well look at Adobe, this just happened to the entire CSS suite. Not open source but proprietary.

hypfer 12 minutes ago | parent

Have you tried using the clones (in an airgapped VM, please)?

Because I did and it's the playable allegory of the cave but in vibecoded rust.

King-Aaron 7 minutes ago | parent

Mate its been a couple of days, I would think you'd be mad to expect perfection from an LLM reverse engineering job straight away.

As a proof of concept however it shows that we are at the stage where any malicious actor has a very low barrier to entry to cause large scale corporate espionage etc.

Capricorn2481 12 minutes ago | parent

How are people even doing this with frontier models without it immediately saying it can't do that.

From what I understand, the adobe guys software is not great.

Gigachad 5 minutes ago | parent

The Adobe one doesn’t seem to be a decomp. It’s just someone asking the ai to build the same tool from scratch in rust.

Consequently it’s missing tons of features.

esseph 4 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

flohofwoe 6 minutes ago | parent

Quake was written C, not C++. The first id game written in C++ was Doom 3 around 2004.

davesque 6 minutes ago | parent

I mean...why not do it? Are you implying it would only have value if someone painstakingly did it by hand?

maxyurk 17 minutes ago | parent

https://warweb.duckdns.org/

I like these

Marazan 16 minutes ago | parent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960369

Quake in Flash player from 2009 I think

Uptrenda 6 minutes ago | parent

Vibe coders need to stop trying to use the browser as a platform for complex games. It's never going to work out and will always lead to a slow, unplayable, piece of shit. If you want to make a game then just make it a desktop program... There's a reason why literally every modern game is built in this way.