Googlers Bring Quake II to the Browser

Posted on 03. Apr, 2010 by in Videos

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A lot of good comes from allowing Google employees to spend twenty percent of their time at work on projects that they want to pursue. A case in point would be this video, which shows Quake II being run in Safari at a rate that must hover around thrity frames per second to look so good. the engine running this is WebGL and HTML5:

It must be nice to be on serious projects like this at work.

More info on the project:

Quake II to the browser.

In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 <audio> elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome.

The port is based on the Jake2 project, compiled to Javascript using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Jake 2 is a Java port of the original Quake II source code, which was open sourced by id software.

To make the Jake 2 code work with GWT, we have

  • Created a new WebGL based renderer
  • Ported the network layer for multiplayer games from UDP to the WebSocket API
  • Made all resource loading calls asynchronous
  • Created a GWT implementation of Java nio buffers based on WebGL arrays (to be ported to ECMAScript Typed Arrays)
  • Implemented a simple file system emulation for saving games and preferences using the Web Storage API
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One Response to “Googlers Bring Quake II to the Browser”

  1. [...] some internal Google employees have ported a first person game like Quake II to the browser as one of their projects. Games are now capable of being ported over to HTML5 and run in the [...]

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