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Browser-Based "Quake Live" Trailer Released
RPS has a great trailer for the new browser-based Quake Live game currently in beta. While it might make the community contribution which has sanded the rough edges off of any of the installments to the franchise a little harder, another round of fragging that I can pick up from any browser could be hugely fun.
I got my invite today, and I have played about 30 mintues of it. It's fast paced, and I've realized how bad I have gotten after years of playing Half Life and TF instead. The servers were populated well enough already. Low ping times, fast paced gaming, all within the browser window. If you didn't get in the beta, try out instantaction.com. They have a browser based Tribes Clone and its really neat to play. They have about 200 people playing at any time and fun CTF matches.
So if this is a browser based game, what are the requirements for hardware, or even more interestingly, for software?
Is it "browser" based needing MS IE7 and ActiveX, or does it actually make an attempt at being cross-platform? Id has been good with this in the past.
There's no way they're doing real time 3d in flash or javascript, so they're almost certainly using ActiveX or a plugin.
Java-based or Flash-based?
If it's either that's not "browser-based" at all.
Looks like HTML 5 and CSS 3 were definitely worth the wait.
I realise posting to blogs is all the rage, but the source for the interesting part of the content here is on gametrailers; you can just go right here to see it directly.
But it doesn't run on linux and on windows only in firefox 2 (and of course ie{6,8}). So... back to warsow.
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Sounds similar to browser based Java game Runescape which recently underwent a major graphics update and now has textures and a full screen mode.
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"You Have Taken the Lead"
"Impressive"
I love Q3, it's still the biggest rush i've ever had on-line.
Just looking at video's of other players, or even hearing the sound-effects
can still give me goosebumps. But won't this incarnation lose a bit of speed?
Maybe i'll be able to blame my lost skillz on lag, like the people i used to frag!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
By my reading of the Wikipedia article it's only 'browser based' in that it is launched by a web browser, but it uses the Quake III Arena engine. I'm guessing you click 'join this game' on a web page and the Quake Live desktop app starts up and takes you directly into that game.
Using an older game engine like that has the advantage that it probably starts up relatively quickly on modern computers, so clicking on a link to start the program wouldn't be as slow and frustrating as starting up (say) Crysis, making it *feel* more like it's actually integrated with the web site.
Which is probably fine, since I don't imagine playing Quake in a web browser window would be as much fun as playing it fullscreen, anyway. ~__~
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It's a neat idea, especially since it looks to add-in a lot of Team Arena's functionality. However, I still have the actual game installed and always will. The "Generations Arena" mod is just about as good as gaming gets.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
so they're almost certainly using ActiveX or a plugin
Or a standalone executable which is launched by a thin library plugin and embed into the browser.
This approach is really popular among open source plug-in for Firefox :
- Gnash plug-in is a small libraries which actually launch gtk-gnash in a separate process.
- Mplayer plug-in a small libraries which launch a full MPlayer wich can even be un-embeded to display the video in full screen or in a resizeable window.
etc...
The advantage of this approach is that the fancy stuff runs in a separate process and doesn't take down the whole browser in case of bug or memory leak (the official Adobe Flash is a real nightmare...) and this gives much more resources to the plug-in which would necessarily be available if the plugin had to work from within the main Firefox thread.
Thus Quake Live could very well be quake 3 recompiled and slapped together with a small plug-in whose job is to launch the quake executable and communicate between the browser session and the quake executable instance.
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Sounds great! I guess once it's out I'll have to get it blocked at work or I'll never get anything done.
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
thanks for the link
Can it run traditional Q3 modifications?
I am hoping this might, maybe, perhaps, hopefully mean a slight chance of Weapons Factory Arena springing back to life again. Because they certainly dropped the ball on the promised Quake4 mod.
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you imply that there's some sort of alternative {...} If so, what's the advantages/disadvantages to it?
Alternative 1 :
gnash - open source flash player. Isn't final yet. But manages to play most flash movies, including mediaplayers from YouTube and a couple of others.
The advantages are :
- support for native 64-bits
- runs in a separate process as mentioned before thus doesn't fubar the whole browser.
The disadvantages are :
- still work in progress, doesn't support all flash movies yet, but it's improving.
- for some obscure reason I can't get the 0.8.3 plugin to work, although the previous -rc# worked fine.
Alternative 2 :
SWFdec
Also an opensource player.
Compared to gnash :
- it's a library so it runs in the same process as firefox.
- I've heard that it has a tad bit better compatibility, but I don't use it myself because of the process stuff.
(Also not-exactly-alternative 3 :
Running the official adobe flash from within nspluginwrapper :
- bring 64 bit support.
- reportedly flash is run from a separate process and can't manage to fuck up the browser. didn't bother to test these claims)
(Also not-exactly-alternative 4 :
Use the alternative standalone adobe flash player, available usually in the developper package.
Either run it separetely and copy past URLs or use something moz-plugger which is a generic embeder of external application inside firefox.
You have original adobe's compatibility, but separate processes.
The main drawback is that it freezes for sligthly longer times than the flash plugin.
But on a well configured distro it's able to communicate with the default browser to open new windows, etc.
was my main way to get Flash in 64bits until gnash and nspluginwrapper stabilised. Now I just switch between both depending on need)
I definitely think that gnash is worth a try. It's not polished yet. But anyway FireFox 3 offers a way to switch plug-ins on the fly without restarting the browser.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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Does anyone have any educated guesses on how difficult this will be to hack? Free web-based FPS crunchy actiony goodness sounds awesome, but it'll be ruined if the servers are infested with aimbots and wallhacks and whatever else cheaters use these days.
I'm glad I already graduated. Between Facebook, IM apps, Youtube, and uh, Slashdot, I already had to wait a good 15-20 minutes to jump on a workstation to check my school email and course webpages. The minimum-wage monitors were shrugging their shoulders before, I can't imagine what it's going to be like when this gets spread around.