Google has done the “impossible” to show the power of HTML5, and ported Quake II to run in the web browser in what seems another dig at Adobe’s Flash.
The move seems a little contradictory, with Google announcing just last week that they were bundling Adobe’s Flash with Chrome. Either way, a lot of work appears to have gone into porting the game.
“We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)” said Google’s Chris Ramsdale.
Right now, the game will only run in Google Chrome and Safari, and the port can be downloaded by visiting the Google code page.
Kevin wrote on April 8, 2010 at 11:43 am
How is this a slap in the face to Flash? It’s running in Java not HTML5. Sure the canvas element is used big deal. It’s still a Java program. This isn’t the first time we were able to run Java programs in a web browser. =P
Tara wrote on July 12, 2010 at 5:07 am
Actually, it’s JavaScript, not Java.