Quake II Gets Ported to Your HTML5 Web Browser

There's been a recent surge in HTML5 development thanks in large part to Apple not supporting Flash for its iPad.

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Google's Chris Ramsdale wrote in a blog post:

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)!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. Enjoy!

While we've seen more impressive efforts from a browser through id Software's Quake Live, it requires a special custom plugin. This work from Google showing off HTML5 bypasses the need for custom software and plays it through right into Safari or Chrome. Sadly, Firefox doesn't support the necessary HTML5 required for this tech demo.

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Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.