Quake2 Ported to Java, Play Via the Web

casemon writes "Quake2 fans unite! Thanks to German software developer ByTonic software, you can now play Quake2 via the web with Jake2 a java port of ID Softwares seminal Quake2. ByTonic claims performance is similar to original C version. From the Jake2 website; "Jake2 is a Java 3D game engine. It is a port of the GPL'd Quake2 game engine from idSoftware. To use the Jake2 engine you need either the data files from the original game or from the demo version available for download from ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com." You actually don't need to get the data files, they've set it up to automatically download the 38Mb demo assets using WebStart. Just click the Play Now button and away you go. Most features supported, even multiplayer server!"

Comments

If I was Sun CEO...

[should_be_linear]

... I would give this guy research lab and resources to create java-based DirectX library. For game developers, it would be just great to write once and sell on Windows on Linux on Mac on Playstation (don't know about XBox). Even without Sun's support, it would be great fot 3rd party to sell such engine/framework.

Re:If I was Sun CEO...

[TheRaven64]

Java already has an OpenGL interface (presumably what this is using). I don't know what this guy is using for sound (although the Java Media Framework might work), or input, but presumably all of the pieces are already there. What Sun really needs to do is market Java better as a game development platform. Add some code for loading models as OpenGL display lists, and a few other convenience methods and start plugging the platform better. Oh, and relax the licensing so I can run Java on my FreeBSD box without jumping through hoops.

Re:Quake 2 seminal?

[Antonymous Flower]

Quake 2 was the first game designed for and supporting 3d acceleration out of the box. In this way it is certainly seminal. So much so, in fact, that 3d acceleration is no longer a part of the collective consumer consciousness :)

Re:Erm, link:

[MartinG]

This is a bullshit argument that generally presumes a substandard optimization by the binary compiler.

No it assumes that the compiler cannot know the most common runtime code paths (which is true). A JIT engine can of course.

Even with compilers that read seperately collected profiler data (such as recent gcc which can take gprof output) can only work on that one profiler measurement. Lots of software is highly dependent on usage patterns and so different paths will be run depending on how the user uses the software. Only runtime optimisation can take this into account.