Tag Archives: Quake II
Gaming Could be a Possible Growth Area for Google
Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
1 Comments
Last week, TechCrunch deftly pointed out that Google is on the hunt for someone to fill the role of Product Management Leader, Games. Currently, Google really does have too much going in the gaming market. It did, however, recently purchase LabPixies which creates widget-like games for the iGoogle portal as well as making games for Apple products, Android systems and social networking sites.
So the gaming arena could in fact be another engine of growth for Google, one that diversifies the company from advertising and its stated goal of profiting from enterprise cloud applications. If they move aggressively in this space, they may find themselves at an advantage when you consider that the console industry is now experiencing an overall decline in sales. More often than ever, multipurpose devices such as the iPad and smartphones allow people more flexibility to play video games without having to pay a lot of money for gaming titles. This is also true when you consider how successful some companies have become offering games on social networks.
Even 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 current generation of browsers, such as the Asteroids port that is available at the Chrome Experiments site.
Even OnLive, which plans on streaming games to your PC or television, will be launching this summer, allowing gamers to play their favorite titles from top publishers in an entirely new way. Although the bandwidth requirements may be quite high, OnLive is dubbing their service as “the future of gaming” which is most likely true.
Bottom line? There is a lot of room for Google to grow in gaming since their footprint right now is nascent. I would not be surprised if they would go with the now-classic free model that is supported by advertising, expertise that a mobile ad company like AdMob can lend to Google’s wealth of knowledge from utilizing AdWords on web sites and Apps like Gmail. That is, if the Federal Trade Comission ever approves the Google-AdMob deal.
Play Asteroids in Chrome – Thanks to HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript
Posted on 08. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments
Ah, the virtues of the HTML5 standard paired with JavaScript – so many innovative applications for it. Not to mention those applications that include gaming. Over on the Chrome Experiments site, an enterprising UK developer by the name of Kevin Roast recently release a browser-based port of the classic Asteroids game, where you buzz around in a spaceship and shoot asteroids and enemies that shoot back:
According to the notes included with game, this was created as a studious experiment in an attempt to learn how to use the relatively new HTML5 canvas technology.
With this and the news that some Google employees ported Quake II to the browser, these are great developments for gaming. No longer will users need to worry about downloading, system requirements and graphics latency, they can just use a browser to play games which no doubt will become more graphically complex as time goes on.
The Asteroids game works with Chrome, Firefox 3 and Safari 4 browsers. You can even download the source from the site as well if you’re interested.
Googlers Bring Quake II to the Browser
Posted on 03. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
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
