Originally posted on April 6, 2010 @ 8:48 am
This here is the future of gaming, folks. One day in the not-so-distant future, we’ll be playing games on our browsers – without any plugins of some sort.
Played Quake Live before? If you haven’t I suggest you do it – it’s an excellent port of Quake Arena with better graphics, and you play on your browser. However, it uses a plugin, so it’s not exactly the most optimal way to play games on your browser. Same goes for Flash-based games like Farmville.
So what if you can play Quake 2 on your browser – with no plug-in needed? All you need to do it woud be HTML 5 and WebGL. And Google has pulled it off, apparently. Check out the video demo:
According to Download Squad:
They started off with Bytonic Software’s Jake2, a Java port of the open source Quake engine. From there, they re-compiled the engine using the Google Web Toolkit (also OSS), created a WebGL renderer to display the graphics, moved multiplayer communications from UDP to WebSockets (part of the HTML5 spec), and bolted on an emulated filesystem to allow game and preference saves.
However, I’ve looked for the download link in the Google Code page. I can’t find it anywhere. So if you want to try out something else that uses HTML 5 for Quake, you might want to check out Copperlicht. It’s a JavaScript 3D engine that utilizes WebGL and HTML5.
Amazingly, Copperlicht can actually render up to 110 FPS! For comparison, Google Quake 2 can only render 30-40 FPS. Copperlicht is going to work for Firefox, Chrome and Safari.