Forget Flash! Yes, an intrepid team of Google engineers has managed to create an HTML5 port of Quake II that runs at over 30 frames per second (FPS).
“The new crop of HTML5 web browsers are capable of some pretty amazing things, and several of our engineers decided to take some 20% time to see how far we could push them. The result? An HTML5 port of Id’s Quake II game engine,” explained Google spokesperson Chris Ramsdale.
“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)!”
However, Ramsdale cautioned that the port probably wouldn’t run in anything less than a modern browser.
“It’s still early days for WebGL, so you won’t be able to run it without a bleeding edge browser, but if you’d like to check out the code and give it a whirl yourself, you can find it here.”
