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Quake 2 ported to HTML5 (ajaxian.com)
143 points by jeff18 on April 1, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments



I'm completely excited about everything that's happening in the html5 ecosystem.

It's been a plateau for the last 10 years, even with the buzzwords that have come and gone, not a lot of what I saw impressed me, and now it seems like all of a sudden, like you've walked round a corner and discovered some completely fucking mind blowing sight.

So brilliant that many of the things we have been trying to do but having to wrestle with the platform to achieve, are now supported and standardised.


Not an April fools joke. http://imgur.com/JLfu6.jpg


Why isn't there a link to play?


I'd imagine that this requires some beefy server resources? Even Google has a breaking point...


Got this running on my linnode instance. It plays well, some textures take time to load, and it's hammering disk io.

That said.. It plays really well on my hackintosh. 40 - 60 fps average, sound is okay. Play it with a webkit browser, the nightly safari works well.


Where are the 3D graphics processed? They keep throwing around the 'websockets' term as if they are piping the graphics over ip, but using webgl would seem to indicate the graphics are being generated in the users GPU.


Quake 2 is so old that it had a software renderer as well as support for 3d graphics cards. So they might just run everything in software on the user's CPU?


I've avoided learning anything about HTML5 for the past year, but as it is getting adopted fairly quickly, I'd like to learn. Anyone know of any good HTML5 books or online resources?



I so wish this was true, wouldn't that be an epic step in the web?


I will personally vouch that this is not a hoax. If this is an April Fool's joke, may pg erase all of my karma.

I am playing it at 30 FPS on my MacBook Pro right now. ;)


Say that tomorrow!


It's April 2, and still true :)


Did you look at the project? It looks... plausible.

http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/source/browse/src/c...

there's a bunch of cool gwt client stuff in there. but... maybe i'm just a sucker.


Please note - it seems this is a q2 client, not the full game - one of the steps is run-dedicated-server on your machine.


We don't have the rights to redistribute the quake2 data files, however, if you download the full game, or own it, you can modify the code to unpak and convert the commercial full-game files.

The code contains the single player shareware quake levels, and multiplayer.


Minor clarification: The code doesn't literally contain the shareware levels (we don't have the right to do that either) -- there is a script that will download and convert them for you.

And I've confirmed that it works on the full game pak as well (though conversions won't work, as q2 game dlls are native code). Time to dig up that old copy of Q2!


wow, i just compiled it and got it going. EXTREMELY impressive! i ran the benchmark and got around 24fps on my linux laptop.


Great. Something else to ruin my hotkeys.


I have the same problem. I've noticed an alarming increase in the number of websites that implement their own textboxes / textareas in pure Javascript.

Guess what guys, I can't use your site in conkeror -- unmodified keys already do things. So I am using the competitor instead.


I'm not really sure if this is true. The Chrome mac snapshot is built on April 1st ...


Flagging because there's an identical story right above it. It'd just be better not to split the two, I think. :)


maybe the famous ars tecnica duke nukem forever review wasnt such a joke after all...




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