But there's a lot more CSS features now. While in the past, Turing completeness in CSS required humans to click on checkboxes, now CSS can emulate an entire CPU without JavaScript or requiring user interaction.[1] So I wonder if DOOM could be purely CSS too, in real time.

[0]: https://keithclark.co.uk/labs/css-fps/ [1]: https://lyra.horse/x86css/

> Yes, Lyra Rebane build a x86 CPU completely in CSS, but that technique is simply not fast enough for handing the game loop. So the result is something that uses a lot of JavaScript.

> The problem: CSS can compute a number – 0 for visible and 1 for hidden – but you can’t directly use that number to set visibility. There is a new feature coming to CSS that solves this: if(), but right now it only just shipped in Chrome.

> So I used a trick called type grinding. You create a paused animation that toggles visibility between visible and hidden. Then you set the animation-delay based on the computed value to determine which keyframe is used:

  animation: cull-toggle 1s step-end paused;
  animation-delay: calc(var(--cull-outside) \* -0.5s);

  @keyframes cull-toggle {
    0%, 49.9% { visibility: visible; }
    50%, 100% { visibility: hidden; }
  }

CSS started as purely declarative styling, but between things like conditionals, math functions, and now these rendering tricks, it’s slowly creeping into “programmable system” territory. Not because it’s the right tool for it, but because browsers are becoming the real runtime. The interesting question isn’t “can Doom run in CSS”, it’s how much logic we’ll keep pushing into layers that were never meant to handle it.

Would that be better or worse for webdev? I don't know. But I like to ponder.

EDIT: https://cssdoom.wtf/

Interestingly, it was more choppy in Chromium.

I could not find a key for moving sideways ("strafing").

All in all, quite mind-boggling.

Firefox's WebRender is truly a great creation. While Chrome is faster at most things especially involving JS, Firefox puts so much of its rendering on the GPU so moving elements around is incredibly fast.

FYI if you want to use inspect element, the viewport div consumes mouse elements, you can get rid of this with

  #viewport {
    pointer-events: none;
  }
  #viewport * {
    pointer-events: initial;
  }

The post here could really use it though. The main content is pushed to the bottom of the page!

This is the real horror here, Uncanny-Valley gameplay Doom. It's like those Doom maps where people tried to recreate the game levels from memory, but still made a few mistakes and got some details wrong. This is like that, but for the gameplay rather than the level layouts. It's different enough to be wrong.

We have Green Armor that sets your armor to 200%. Health Bonuses that reset your health to 100% if you exceeded that number, too bad if you recently collected a Soul Sphere. Switch-activated doors that are supposed to stay open, but instead automatically close, but then the secret wall unexpectedly activates like a manual door.

> "Once I’ve proven to myself that rendering was feasible, I used Claude to create an approximate version of the game loop in JavaScript based on the original DOOM source, which to me is the least interesting part of the project"

This post is about whether you can render Doom in CSS not whether Claude can replicate Doom gameplay. I doubt the author even bothered to give the game loop much QA.

Crazy to see how far we've come.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/04/forever/

https://www.simplethread.com/new-and-upcoming-css-features-i...

Also if I want I can cross-compile a static build of Frotz for Linux/Misc and emulate it under a RISC interpreter for Linux syscalls written in... Perl, runable in every modern Perl port out there. Linux/RISC binary under Perl for NetBSD/Vax? Yes. Slow? Not much, it's a text game in the end.

But, as for the ZMachine, you can run text adventures in Android, Game Boy, Amiga, MSDOS, Windows, Palm PDA's... anything 8bit and up.

Also, damn Sokoban under Eforth written in Subleq, a VM which can just:

- set up a 2^16 RAM size

- single opcode: substract A from B, if less than 0, go to addr in C. - A < 0? Get ASCII input in B - B < 0? Put ASCII output in B - C < 0? End

This, just this, and people wrote Subleq simulators in C, AWK, Python, TCL, FPGA's and whatnot. And it will run Eforth, and that means... you can write a ZMachine interpreter on it and be really slow if emulated in a Pentium 4 (maybe 3/5 seconds per command with a ZMachine on top of Eforth for Muxleq instead of Subleq), but the game will be playable and a great exercise on Turing completeness.

If a Mandlebrot render under Muxleq+EForth (with no floats used, just integers) is as fast as a C64/Amiga with a native Forth. then having that tiny EForth+Muxleq is not that useless.

https://github.com/howerj/muxleq

Use Deutex, GNU make and Pillow for Python to compile.

Then wou will have up-to-date IWADS to be used aywhere. No need to put ID copyrights, just a mention to FreeDoom creators.

Also: a modern CPU is around 10000x faster than the 486 CPU Doom was designed for. Per core.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id= and marked it off topic.

No doubt the very loudly opinionated not-web-dev community, who have So Much To Say about web devs and web tech, have produced an uncontroversial, perfect layout system, styling system, and language to produce the replacement for this awful web tech. Where is it? What is it? Please provide (the better version of) a hyperlink to the docs.

Duct tape is awesome for the same reason -- even though there are several effective use cases for duct tape where a different tool would technically be "better" for the job.

You can keep it high level but your comment makes me think you have something in mind, and I'm honestly curious.

In CSS on the web, just centering a div has historically been a problem. We have flexbox now, but what if CSS was designed with our current needs from the get-go?