Google shows the power of HTML 5, ports Quake II to run in browser!

The title says it all. Using the Jake2 port of Quake II (to Java) the bright sparks at Google have used GWT to bring Quake II to HTML 5.

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)!

At first I thought it was an April fools joke, but as cruel as that may be, it wasn’t. Download the source and give it ago, I nearly fell of my chair.

At the moment you have to build from source and mess about a bit, but fear not, I followed the guide on OSNews by Kroc on our MacBook Pro and it worked quite well, yet to try it on Linux.