Google Gets Quake II Running In HTML5

Dr Herbert West writes "A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software's gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers — you know, for kicks — as a way to show just what HTML5-compatible web browsers are capable of. According to the developers, '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.' More details are available on one developer's blog, and installation instructions have been posted as well."

Comments

OMGLOLWTF

[bjartur]

This is really cool and awesome, but why would I wan't to run this on my browser?

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[qoncept]

wan't

I think that's the popular contraction of "wang" and "not." Am I correct? If so, your sentence doesn't make sense.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[endikos]

Because you can.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[crashumbc]

more likely just a typo of "want"...

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[CAFED00D]

Or "want not".

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Pojut]

why wouldn't you?

netbook + small SSD + browser-based full PC game = fun times

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd have to have a pretty unusual keyboard layout to be able to typo "want" into "wan't".

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[idontgno]

In other words, DO NOT WANT

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[commodore64_love]

>>>why would I want to run this on my browser?

It's free.
It's easy to set up (just type google.com/quake2 or whatever).

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, when you have a netbook, you don't need to worry about CPU overhead.

Why not have a game within an emulator within a platform within an app within a platform within a VM?

And being browser based (webkit only, only tested on Mac and Linux) this thing runs on almost as many machines as a Windows binary executable, with only a lot more work needed to get it running.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[godrik]

that's a proof of concept, a technical demo... but I agree with you, I don't need it in my webbrowser.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Anonymous Coward]

I once typoed milk as milf on a QWERTY keyboard.

Typos aren't always about fat-fingering a key.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Pojut]

For now, you may have a point...but eventually, full games will be natively coded to be browser-based without any extra plugins.

That was what I was referring to, not this version of Quake II specifically. For what it's worth, the "original" Quake II runs quite well on just about any decent netbook out there.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you're gonna type with your dick...

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[MrMarket]

Because online game developers now have web platform options for the iphone/iPad

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[dissy]

This is really cool and awesome, but why would I wan't to run this on my browser?

From your implied lack of interest in things technical and nerdy, I would venture a guess that you (you personally) would NOT want to run this in your browser.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[VGPowerlord]

For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead?

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Jurily]

It's exactly this type of cross-platform thinking that kills PC games and makes consoles attractive. Hey, why use DirectX when you can just up the hardware reqs and run it in the browser?

And on the other end, are you seriously planning to run a 3D game in a browser on a phone?

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[ultranova]

For now, you may have a point...but eventually, full games will be natively coded to be browser-based without any extra plugins.

I sincerely doubt it. Javascript is, as the name implies, a scripting language. It has the same problem as with other scripting languages: it's easy to hack something together, but as the size of the project grows, that same feature makes it harder and harder to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a rats nest lined with spaghetti.

The awful fact is that most programmers are mediocre and need handholding from the language to produce good or even okay code. Languages like Javascript or Python allow - even encourage - sloppiness, since that facilitates writing quick and dirty scripts, but a huge application with multiple developers requires damage control which they lack.

It doesn't exactly help that scripting languages tend to catch most errors at runtime rather than compile time, mostly because they like to pretend that variables are untyped yet fail if you try to do something the object doesn't support. Javascript is even worse, since Python at least checks that the basic block structure is sane before starting to execute.

In short, only a masochist would try to code a non-trivial game on Javascript.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Anonymous Coward]

And the circle starts anew.

Little repeating bits of information produce other repeating bits of information and finally, the singularity.

All bits of information start to converge on the one point they can be focused, the human eye.

It's only a question of time, when the number of information, or full games natively coded to be browser-based without any extra plugins will need extra plugins. They will evolve. Some day these games will not even need human players to run. Somebody has to play games, so these games must have some players on shelf, lets call them plugins.
These plugins will at first be programmed by human players but soon they will react by themselve. Humans are lazy, and want their slaves to do work form them. They impose little rules for them. Soon the plugins will learn to use these rules.

Sorry, late Good Friday Night rant, one drink too much.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Sethumme]

Works for the DS

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[magnusrex1280]

Typos are often a case of accidentally typing one word when you meant another. Hitting the wrong key is only one variety of typo.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[arielCo]

That's not a typo - that's a Freudian slip

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[SanityInAnarchy]

Javascript is, as the name implies, a scripting language.

At the time, that distinction was relevant. It isn't anymore.

it's easy to hack something together, but as the size of the project grows, that same feature makes it harder and harder to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a rats nest lined with spaghetti.

Here we go...

You can write COBOL in any language, and you can write good code in any language. If you don't have the discipline for Javascript, you could always write a preprocessor that forces it on you, but I think you'll find that knowledgeable programmers using it on real projects don't tend to have these problems.

The awful fact is that most programmers are mediocre and need handholding from the language to produce good or even okay code.

Another fact is that this same handholding slows down good programmers until you only have mediocrity everywhere. I don't think it even succeeds in making bad programmers mediocre, as TheDailyWTF will confirm.

A good programmer in a good language can easily outperform ten bad-to-mediocre programmers in a crippled language.

Languages like Javascript or Python allow - even encourage - sloppiness, since that facilitates writing quick and dirty scripts,

or Ruby, I would guess. Yet the Ruby community seems to enforce readable, well-architected code, along with readable unit tests (specs) for every change. Say what you will about the effectiveness of testing, it sure as hell isn't sloppy, or a "quick and dirty" solution.

Do I use languages like that when I need a quick hack? Sure! That's because they're good languages, so a quick hack is going to be easier to develop in Python or Ruby than it is in C. But you can write quick hacks in C, Java, or anything else, and you can also write solid code in Python, Ruby, and even Javascript.

It doesn't exactly help that scripting languages tend to catch most errors at runtime rather than compile time,

It doesn't hurt as much as you might imagine when you have full test coverage. In fact, given full test coverage, runtime errors are compile-time errors, meaning fewer runtime errors slipping by than you'd have with a program written in a stricter language but with fewer tests.

mostly because they like to pretend that variables are untyped

That's not pretending. In languages like Javascript, the variables are. It's the objects that are typed.

yet fail if you try to do something the object doesn't support.

Duh. What did you expect?

Here's a hint: Even in Java, there are many cases where something will fail at runtime when you try to do something the object doesn't support, faster than you can say NullPointerException. Or take the standard libraries -- fail-fast iterators, plenty of stuff not designed to work well with concurrent access from multiple threads...

You seem to be assuming that we all write crazy code where no one knows what type of object we're dealing with. In practice, it's not that far off from anonymous subclasses in Java, and it's significantly faster to write, read, and reason about when we don't have to write LongClassName<OtherLongClassName<OtherReallyLongClassName>> foo = new LongClassName<OtherLongClassName<OtherReallyLongClassName>>();

Ever tried to wrap your head around Java Generics, or C++ templates, or .NET... I'm guessing generics? It starts out innocently enough, but it eventually leads to serious issues, some even cropping up at runtime, plenty leaving you scratching your head trying to figure out how to describe exactly what kind of type makes sense here, what kind of inheritance relationship, etc...

That whole nightmare goes away when you can simply declare a variable with 'var' and let the system figure it out.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[SanityInAnarchy]

Hey, why use DirectX when you can just up the hardware reqs and run it in the browser?

*facepalm*

Not that it wouldn't up the hardware reqs, especially with the current state...

But Google is working on a standard for native code in the browser, which would make the browser a safe sandbox for entirely native, full-performance games.

And it is OpenGL. Are you seriously implying DirectX is faster than OpenGL?

And on the other end, are you seriously planning to run a 3D game in a browser on a phone?

Not only am I planning on it, I'm planning for it to work well.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Khyber]

"It's exactly this type of cross-platform thinking that kills PC games and makes consoles attractive."

Yep, you're going to enjoy playing your web-browser FPS on that controller while I beat you down with a dedicated keypad and laser mouse.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[Khyber]

I most certainly would NOT want this running in my browser.

Because needing 1GHz to run something 133MHz could run back in the late 90s is just bullshit.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[physicsdot]

That's not a typo - that's a Freudian slip

Like when you type one word, but mean your mother?

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[tomhuxley]

What ... like MS Excel or Word? It must be the Ribbon Bar that requires all that processing power ... Jeez man, needing a faster processor to do practically the same thing 10 years later is the theme of the microcomputer revolution!

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[ultranova]

Javascript is, as the name implies, a scripting language.

At the time, that distinction was relevant. It isn't anymore.

It describes the intended use cases the language is optimized for, and specifically the size of the applications it's meant to produce.

You can write COBOL in any language, and you can write good code in any language.

You can, but that doesn't mean it's quite as easy. C++ can't do anything C couldn't, yet it's preferred nowadays, precisely because things like data hiding enforce a certain amount of discipline, which in turn makes large multi-person projects feasible.

If you don't have the discipline for Javascript, you could always write a preprocessor that forces it on you, but I think you'll find that knowledgeable programmers using it on real projects don't tend to have these problems.

Good enough programmers can write anything in anythin Turing complete. That says nothing about how good the language is for that particular task, however.

Another fact is that this same handholding slows down good programmers until you only have mediocrity everywhere. I don't think it even succeeds in making bad programmers mediocre, as TheDailyWTF will confirm.

You have a rather interesting definition of a good programmer: "he who produces code the fastest." Traditionally, it's been "he who's code executes fastest or fails least", but I guess that's Javascript generation for you :p.

A good programmer in a good language can easily outperform ten bad-to-mediocre programmers in a crippled language.

You think that forcing the programmer to decide what kind of data he'll store in a variable to be crippling?

It doesn't hurt as much as you might imagine when you have full test coverage. In fact, given full test coverage, runtime errors are compile-time errors, meaning fewer runtime errors slipping by than you'd have with a program written in a stricter language but with fewer tests.

And what if you write in a strict language and run as many tests as you would with the sloppy language? How many errors do you get then?

mostly because they like to pretend that variables are untyped

That's not pretending. In languages like Javascript, the variables are. It's the objects that are typed.

Perhaps you might explain the significance of this to me? Because either way, the end result is the good old "cast everything to (void *)" pattern of C/C++.

Duh. What did you expect?

That the language either allows any operation on any object, or acknowledges that objects have types and so should the variables that refer to them.

Here's a hint: Even in Java, there are many cases where something will fail at runtime when you try to do something the object doesn't support, faster than you can say NullPointerException.

Yes, there is, altought ClassCastException would be more relevant to the topic. However, Javascript has all the same cases and a host of others on top of that. That is the problem with pretending objects are typeless: it moves error checking from compile time to runtime.

You seem to be assuming that we all write crazy code where no one knows what type of object we're dealing with.

No, I'm saying that Javascript makes it really really easy to make just that kind of code, and once you have more than one programmer involved, it's far harder to keep track of what's going on than in, say, Java.

In practice, it's not that far off from anonymous subclasses in Java, and it's significantly faster t

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[SanityInAnarchy]

It describes the intended use cases the language is optimized for, and specifically the size of the applications it's meant to produce.

HTML was never meant to be dynamically generated. This very forum, even if you remove JavaScript, is a hack well beyond the design of the language.

Lisp's syntax was never intended to be final, and there was always the plan that other, higher-level, more intuitive languages would be built on top of it. But Lisp hackers found they actually liked s-expressions, so they stayed. Many people argue now that they're a feature of the language.

C was originally conceived as a high-level, portable language.

How about we evaluate what it's actually good for, and not its intended purpose?

C++ can't do anything C couldn't, yet it's preferred nowadays,

Depends who you talk to. Just try getting C++ in the Linux kernel, for example -- you'll be laughed out of the room. Yet you couldn't say the Linux kernel is a small project, and it certainly makes use of things like data-hiding.

You can do OO in C.

I agree with your point, I just think you chose a lousy example.

enforce a certain amount of discipline, which in turn makes large multi-person projects feasible.

What, the enforcement, or the discipline?

In order for your patch to even be considered into Rails, you have to generate a unit test which proves both that your patch works, and that it's needed. Culture trumps compiler-enforced discipline every time.

Now, does that mean I think we should go back to C, where a lack of discipline could lead to buffer overruns? Of course not -- that's a case where the machine can do work for you, reducing both the amount of effort on your part and your chances of screwing up. Static typing, at best, makes it harder for you to screw up -- but it means more work throughout, and it introduces a whole new category of screwups.

You have a rather interesting definition of a good programmer: "he who produces code the fastest."

Would it help if I said "makes good programmers less productive"?

You think that forcing the programmer to decide what kind of data he'll store in a variable to be crippling?

That alone? No, that sounds innocuous enough.

No, I'm talking about the byzantine class hierarchies, interface declarations, and arcane generics (or templates) which are required to accomplish the simplest of tasks -- not to mention the lack of certain language features, like closures and easy reflection...

As an example, take the following hypothetical Java method:

public static void<T> sort(T[] list, Comparator<T> comp) { ... }

This is incorrect. Can you spot what's wrong with it?

Compare to the equivalent in a duck-typed language like Ruby -- I don't have to care that the list of things I've received is even an array, I only care that it responds to []. I don't even need a Comparator, I can just accept a block of code (think function pointer) and call that. It, in turn, likely cares about some specific property of the objects I'm comparing, not that they're of a specific type.

And what if you write in a strict language and run as many tests as you would with the sloppy language? How many errors do you get then?

Then you get the error of having taken 3-10 times as long to get to market as your competitors.

Type checking is a subset of unit testing.

Perhaps you might explain the significance of this to me? Because either way, the end result is the good old "cast everything to (void *)" pattern of C/C++.

Maybe in Javascript, though I doubt it. Not, for example, in Ruby.

The idea is "duck typing" -- rather than declare types explicitly, we go with what we actually ca

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[thoughtsatthemoment]

>> a 3D game requires lots of data that must be downloaded the first time and then stored locally. > Why? I think it has something to do with resolution. The game is designed for any resolution, and lots of computation is needed to load a scene at the user selected resolution. I really wish they could do it differently now as nowadays even a $50 dollar card can have 1GB video ram.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[SanityInAnarchy]

I think it has something to do with resolution. The game is designed for any resolution,

Technically, so are flash games. In reality, they generally run in a fixed-size window, but those vector graphics are designed to scale.

lots of computation is needed to load a scene...

That's got nothing to do with what ultranova was talking about. Is there a bandwidth reason this wouldn't work?

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[thoughtsatthemoment]

To run optimally, the data has to be computed to a specific setting and then be stored locally for future use. I think this is a possible answer to "a 3D game requires lots of data that must be downloaded the first time and then stored locally.";

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[SanityInAnarchy]

To run optimally, the data has to be computed to a specific setting and then be stored locally for future use.

Erm, what?

Which data and what specific setting?

And there's nothing stopping you from storing precomputed values in HTML5's local storage.

Re:OMGLOLWTF

[mcvos]

In short, only a masochist would try to code a non-trivial game on Javascript.

Note that these people didn't code the game in Javscript. They coded it in Java, and compiled that to Javascript.

Javascript is still a sucky language to code in or compile to. At the very least, it should have sane scoping and not try to make everything global. A linker would help too. But it's what we've got, and turns out to work very well despite its problems.

Your issues about dynamic typing are completely irrelevant, however. A dynamic language with closures and metaprogramming (which Javascript has) turns out to be great for big projects. In fact, they tend to become a lot smaller and easier to manage. Javascript's problems are entirely related to its global variables, lack of sane scopes, and the fact that it's trying to pretend it's C or Java, when really it's mutilated Lisp.

Installation Instructions?

[methano]

If this is so cool as described, why do I need installation instructions? Shouldn't it just run in Chrome or Safari?

Now it's time to go RTFA.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[TheRaven64]

I saw this running a couple of months ago when I visited Google London. The guy who wrote it said it ran in Chrome with no plugins, so I'd imagine that you'd just go to the page and view it, although you'd need to grab the resources from a real Q2 install or demo. It's a nice tech demo, but on his modern multi-core machine it ran about as fast as Quake 2 ran on my old P166. It's one of those hacks that is cool because it's deeply wrong, not something that is in any way sensible.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[cduffy]

Also, it presently needs a dev version of chrome started with a command line parameter that disables some sandboxing features.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Anonymous Coward]

The installation is actually for the server. If someone else installs it, hosts it, and gives you the website you should be able to run it without installing anything but the browser. (Though according to the guy above me it has to be a dev version of chrome).

Re:Installation Instructions?

[dAzED1]

It's one of those hacks that is cool because it's deeply wrong, not something that is in any way sensible.

You apparently don't fully understand the bane on existence that flash is. The POC is as a flash replacement, not as a platform for replacing your xbox/ps3/wii.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[TheRaven64]

I don't see how WebGL is a Flash replacement, given that Flash is a 2D platform. JavaScript + Canvas or SVG gives you the 2D stuff, without WebGL. WebGL is aimed squarely at things that Flash can't do.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[am 2k]

Still, OpenGL/WebGL is pretty well suited for pixel-based 2D stuff too.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how WebGL is a Flash replacement, given that Flash is a 2D platform. JavaScript + Canvas or SVG gives you the 2D stuff, without WebGL. WebGL is aimed squarely at things that Flash can't do.

Technically, Flash is a rendering platform. It's up to the designer to render what she wants. The fact that a Canvas only has x/y doesn't mean a savy programmer can't write her own 3D software renderer. As a matter of fact there are some out there already for AS3/ActionScript.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Sancho]

Flash sucks, no doubt. But the development tools are great. That's where Flash really shines--any idiot can build a flash game.

When there are tools to easily build JS+Canvas+Websockets+audio+HTML5, then you may see the beginning of the end of Flash.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[TheRaven64]

And the same is true of canvas and, indeed, there is something that displays Doom levels done in JavaScript with the Canvas tag. Like Flash, however, it does not take advantage of 3D hardware.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Anonymous Coward]

"that is cool because it's deeply wrong"

I kinda agree. This is like the XGL stuff on Linux. It seems stunningly revolutionary but actually is just eye candy.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's one of those hacks that is cool because it's deeply wrong, not something that is in any way sensible.

Well, yes and no.

Yes, it's deeply wrong, and it's a hack, because we're talking about a Java version of Quake2 which was ported to Google Web Toolkit, and I can't imagine that would lead to the best performance. Also, Quake2 already has a native open source client.

However, running 3D games in the browser is sensible. It's a long way from being a replacement for native games, but think about the appeal of flash games, and add relatively modern graphics capabilities to that.

Or consider an angle for an MMO -- just visit our website and you drop right into the game, no need to download anything, let alone gigabytes and gigabytes of data via BitTorrent. If we change an asset, just rely on standard HTTP cache invalidation to pick it up.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[SanityInAnarchy]

If by XGL you mean modern compositing window managers, they're actually a performance improvement on modern hardware, and some of that "eye candy" is real usability enhancements -- everything from a drop shadow (helps make it more obvious which window is on top, and that it's a discrete window, making it easier to look at and comprehend) to expose or alt+tab with live previews (now which of my many terminals did I want? Hold alt, hit tab, watch them fly by... oh yes, that one)...

Oh, and an actual, working, performant zoom. That alone is worth it.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Khyber]

Flash and Shockwave are merged, that means Flash has 3d rendering capabilities.

Shockwave 9 or 10 had 3d capability, I remember playing a motorcycle racing 3d game using it.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[jonadab]

> It's one of those hacks that is cool because it's deeply
> wrong, not something that is in any way sensible.

Let me know when they get it working in Lynx. That would be something to see.

(I know about the old aalib port of quake, but IMO running it through a text-mode browser would be going a step further into perverse awesomeness.)

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Hurricane78]

No. What you don’t understand, is the inner platform anti-pattern ! Or would it make sense to you, to boot Linux inside that browser thing, start a virtual machine in it, boot windows 7 in that, install CygWin, run Emacs, simulate a CPU in it, run OS X on that, start safari, and play quake 2 at 1 frame per week?

Yes, it is good to be able to do it without Flash. But you are thinking inside a teeny-tiny box!
You got the ability to run Quake 2 without Flash since Quake 2 exists, because you can run it straight on your CPU! No browser needed! And the OS is mainly a set of libraries that would have to be included anyway, so no pointless inner platform.

Because that is really the key point: This demo is using a crappy replica of the environment it is using.
This is also, why template languages, like TypoScript, in web programming are deeply wrong.

No. That dosen’t mean that all abstractions are bad. It means that pointless and bad abstractions are bad.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Hurricane78]

any idiot can build a flash game.

You say that as if it were something good. Look what “any idiot can...” did to non-strict (X)HTML!
It is not good. It is the very reason we hat all those stupid crappy Flash intros in the first place.

An idiot should not be able to write a website! Not even the simplest one!
Then we would not have had that mess that is the current browser engines!

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Hurricane78]

Is someone really opposing that a browser’s parser should be just as clean as a real compiler, and hence an idiot should fail to use it? Seriously??

Or did an idiot get mod points? ;)
Whoever it was, he did not spend a day in professional web development.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[mzs]

I don't like staring at bright snow, neither do I like staring at many white windows. Drop shadows are simply annoying for me, not an enhancement.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[im_thatoneguy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH4p8wzqtuA

Because as we all know, flash can't handle 3D.

Re:Installation Instructions?

[Anonymous Coward]

not really, i've developed 3D Flash first person shooter game, 3D Future Ops, with 44 player co-story mode, team deathmatch, zombie mode, and soon will be absorbed into an MMO version of the game where all modes help you level. and i plan for a simple card game to gamble with the points you earn =) . http://realdefinition.net/Main.html if your interested in playing it, invite a friend its funner.

the linky in the video not working

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I try it out online?

Re:the linky in the video not working

[DevConcepts]

Try http://www.bytonic.de/html/jake2_webstart.html

Re:the linky in the video not working

[binarylarry]

Or an applet version: http://download.java.net/javadesktop/plugin2/jake2/

Re:the linky in the video not working

[Yvan256]

Javascript != Java. That link if for the Java version, not the HTML5 version which is the current topic.

Re:the linky in the video not working

[binarylarry]

yeah but the Java version is basically the same thing according TFA and it works now in 95%+ of peoples browsers AND its an order of magnitude faster.

Re:the linky in the video not working

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA says the HTML5 version was made from the Java version. They're not the same thing because Java isn't HTML5, neither is Flash.

Re:the linky in the video not working

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Java. It's gonna have a shit interface. Crash all the time. Take ages to load. Spam my OS with update demands. Run pointless stupid icons in the system tray. Five second splash screens while loading. Confusing version numbering.

Java IS CRAP!

Re:the linky in the video not working

[binarylarry]

Did you, by chance, click my link and see that you're completely wrong?

Re:the linky in the video not working

[DevConcepts]

Still better than flash! BTW, PMS?

Re:the linky in the video not working

[DevConcepts]

Like it better than the one I found.

April Fool

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't this posted yesterday?

Re:April Fool

[dgatwood]

Yes, the original blog post was, in fact, posted on April 1.

Re:April Fool

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up the parent or suffer the wrath of having _not modded up the parent post_!

Innovation

[Reason58]

we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops

Holy shit! Quake II hasn't seem frame rates like that since the 486! No matter how fast computers get programmers will always find a way to slow down their programs.

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

Um, dude? I know this certifies me as Gamer Grandpa, but you were unlikely to see a solid 30 fps in Quake II with the software renderer on less than a Pentium 166. Behold the miracles of the (many, many) layers of browser abstraction in action. Or perhaps inaction...

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

They're using WebGL. It's hardware accelerated and still runs that slow. Although, they did say it was on a laptop - if it's on an Intel graphics chip, it might be faster in software mode.

Re:Innovation

[godrik]

you mean we are reaching the performances we had 15 years ago instead of 20 ?

Re:Innovation

[stevenvi]

I played the original Quake on a 486/66 DX2. It ran at about 2 fps. I went back to playing Duke Nukem 3D and never looked back.

Re:Innovation

[yahwotqa]

Yeah, Quake on a 486 gave me impression that I'm in fact controlling a slow, bulky battle tank instead of a nimble marine. :) After running it on a Pentium, though, it got much, much snappier, and quickly became my favourite game for a few months. Even now, I sometimes launch fuhquake and have some deathmatch fun with omicronbots.

Re:Innovation

[Vintermann]

Even Quake one would barely run on a 486.

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean we are reaching the performances we had 15 years ago instead of 20 ?

You weren't playing Quake II in a Web Browser 15 years ago, douche.

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously, there was a point here, and you missed it by at least a mile.

Re:Innovation

[VGPowerlord]

I played the original Quake on a 486/66 DX2. It ran at about 2 fps. I went back to playing Duke Nukem 3D and never looked back.

This is probably why Duke Nukem 3D was my friends and my FPS of choice (it had to compete with Warcraft 2 for multiplayer playtime, though).

Re:Innovation

[CAIMLAS]

I had a friend who played quite a lot of Quake on a DX2 with (IIRC 8MB RAM, may have been 12 or 16 though, but I think it was 8). It ran at about 15fps - playable for him, at least. Caveat: he unloaded almost everything (custom "Quake only" cmd.com and the like) and ran the game in the "postage stamp" size "window". It was hilarious to watch: he would sit about 3" from the screen.

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

Quake was listed as officially unsupported on anything less than a Pentium, and they recommended that it be run on a Pentium 75. That was the only way to be sure that the infamous Pentium FDIV bug didn't rear its misshapen head. It's hard to believe Quake would be in high school by now if it were a person.

Duke3D definitely ran faster - on a system meeting Quake's minimum specifications you could get away with running in 640x480, or other lower resolutions if your graphics card supported VESA 2.0 and were comfortable with editing a config file. That said, it was no picnic on a 486DX/33 with no L2 cache...

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

He could have gotten away with 8 MB of RAM cheerfully. The engine's minimum running environment was really around 6 MB, though at that point it dropped sound effects and the textures started getting really blurry... Upgrading to 24 MB RAM was easily one of the better things I did in 1997.

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

Ach, I hate responding to myself, but the FDIV bug wasn't isolated to Socket 4 (60/66 MHz) Pentiums like I'd thought. It apparently persisted all the way up to some Socket 5 120 MHz models, before being truly fixed. Back to the show.

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

I'm at work behind a video-unfriendly firewall, so thank you for pointing that out. :) That will be worth checking out when I get home.

Re:Innovation

[X0563511]

Keep in mind Duke3D wasn't actually 3D. It was based off the doom ID engines (heretic and such). Quake II was, you know, actual 3D.

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

Duke3D was pseudo-3D, but ran on the Build engine, not Doom. :) It had a much nicer feature set: support for resolutions higher than 640x400, room-over-room support, sloping floors, etc.

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

I overheard someone once say they tried reading Dune and then went back to reading twilight and never looked back

Re:Innovation

[X0563511]

Oh all right. But it was still sprite based, and had some wierd pseudo perspective. Quake 2 was true polygonal 3D for just about everything (excepting a couple sprites). Not sure what to call the particle system.

Re:Innovation

[Eil]

Not sure what to call the particle system.

Maybe call it a particle system?

Re:Innovation

[FreonTrip]

OK. I've seen it running now, and can make a few comments.

It's difficult to tell exactly what the framerate is - it rises and lowers in certain places, but it's difficult to tell with certainty whether that represents the playable state, or if it's just chugging because they used Fraps to capture it on a lower-end system. The Intel video's historically undercooked GL driver isn't helping, and I don't know whether Jake2 or vanilla Quake II run well on that hardware by default.

The most interesting thing I noticed was that the executable was periodically generating .mp3 files derived from the original .wav sounds. Precaching and storing those would be a good first step to improving speed, as dynamically encoding them on an as-needed basis would be unnecessary computational work.

Good work, Google! This certainly looks better than Quake II did on the hardware around in 1998 that ran the game at an equivalent speed, and I'm keen to see whether this goes anywhere.

Re:Innovation

[Hurricane78]

I hear you. But wait until someone ported Chrome to Chrome! They may ask Xzibit on how to do it. ^^

Sup dawg, I herd u liek innr platformz, so we put a browser in yo browser, so yo can waste resources, while wasting resources!

HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

Capable of further dragging us down as we fall into ever more inefficient programming paradigms.

Lovely.

Re:HTML5

[oldhack]

Yeah, it's like adding lanes to choked freeways.

Re:HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

More like, dividing existing lanes into sublanes.

Re:HTML5

[blai]

More like, adding more cars.

Re:HTML5

[Alanonfire]

Where are our flying cars?

Re:HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

More like, adding tracks on high way.

Art is not redistributable.

[pavon]

From the project FAQ:

We are as yet unable to provide a public demo link. The Quake II code is GPL licensed, but the demo resources (textures, models, sounds, et al) are not, so we cannot simply upload them to a server. We are pursuing legitimate avenues to do so, though -- stay tuned.

Re:Art is not redistributable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, you can rely on leilol in a few years to make some anime prostitutes with laser guns for the base game.

Hey, at least it's GPL!

Re:Art is not redistributable.

[thetoadwarrior]

I'm not sure why they couldn't use the demo resources.

Demostration of what?

[leuk_he]

Is this a demonstration of how far browser tech is now, or how far browser games are behind on native application?

Re:Demostration of what?

[BuR4N]

Both I believe

Re:Demostration of what?

[binarylarry]

The Java version of Jake2 runs at around the same speed as the native C version (sometimes a little slower, sometimes a little faster):

http://download.java.net/javadesktop/plugin2/jake2/

Interesting

[binarylarry]

The most recent Jake2 release was comparable and faster in some situations than the native C version.

I wonder how the javascript version stacks up to the Java and C versions.

Re:Interesting

[binarylarry]

Oh, Jake2 benchmarks: http://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html

Re:Interesting

[binarylarry]

I just didn't want some douche bag crying about how I lacked a reference. ;)

Re:Interesting

[MobyDisk]

That graph compares "original C code" to a Java version using jogl. Does the original C version of Quake use OpenGL or software rendering? If they are comparing software-rendered C to OpenGL accelerated Java, that's a silly comparison. Or am I mistaken about the original C version?

Re:Interesting

[binarylarry]

The benchmarks are against the hardware accelerated OpenGL path of Quake2.

I agree, benchmarking the C software renderer against a hardware accelerated Java renderer would be a joke. :)

No Chome?

[msavory]

Why Safari and not Chrome?

Re:No Chome?

[X0563511]

Er, it's for chromium. Learn to read, please.

You Heard It Here First

[Anonymous Coward]

admit it

Proof of Concept

[pavon]

The purpose of something like this is to push the boundaries of what can be done in web development as a means of determining where it falls short, and what needs to be done to allow efficient practical applications in the future.

Re:Proof of Concept

[TaoPhoenix]

So does this mean the folks whining about "flash is needed for cheap space invader games" can go away now?

Re:Proof of Concept

[NatasRevol]

For the love of God, I hope so.

Re:Proof of Concept

[Anonymous Coward]

But I thought you loved Satan?

Re:Proof of Concept

[Anonymous Coward]

Hailing somebody everyday does not imply love.

Re:Proof of Concept

[buchner.johannes]

Another interesting aspect is that Jake2 was already a half-automatic translation from C to Java, now they do another half-automatic translation from Java to another language ...

Re:Proof of Concept

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh

How about Urban Terror?

[CranberryKing]

Since I can already play QuakeLive in a browser, I probably won't get too excited about Q2.

Re:How about Urban Terror?

[The MAZZTer]

QuakeLive doesn't run in Chrome.

Quake Live

[FrostedWheat]

This is what Quake Live should have been!

Re:Quake Live

[Hamsterdan]

Yup... I can only imagine a *MASSIVE* CTF match, would be much better than just a fragfest :)

Re:Quake Live

[shutdown -p now]

This is what Quake Live should have been!

It should have been turn-based? ~

It doesn't count if it can't play Doom

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't count if it can't play Doom

Re:It doesn't count if it can't play Doom

[antdude]

DOOM FTW. It is my favorite id Software game (Wolfenstein 3D is second) and one of my favorite computer games.

progress!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the kind of thing to create a new need for progress in computing. Remember when quake1 came out? We didn't have 3D acceleration in the consumer PC market.

Benchmarks

[cosm]

Does it run Crysis?

Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

.NET has changed significantly over the past 6 years, can the same be said for Java?

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[binarylarry]

Yes, considerably: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that most of it is syntactical sugar, like generics:
generics just compile down to objects and are just cast into the generic type. Not like .NET.
No nullable primitive types.
Not sure if you can use a string for a switch statement
Do you have attributes? Instead of the ugly getters and setters?
What about nice nestable master pages?

Most of the links on the site are broken... seriously.

Reason #1: Public Domain APIs - Any Java public apis are part of the public domain, .NET apis are proprietary and can open the door to a law suit.[citation needed]

Reason #2: Standard Library Source Code Availability - Java source code for the core libraries are available in every J2SDK distribution, .NET sources can only be seen by resorting to illegal means.

Mono does this for one.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[binarylarry]

The vast majority of the items apply just as much today.

Mono does this for one.

Not really. A nice chunk of the .NET platform isn't implemented yet in Mono (unimplemented exceptions) and a sizeable part of that will never be implemented due to manpower and patent reasons. In addition, Microsoft's .NET platform is not open source and Mono is not the same thing (see last sentence).

I think Mono is a good thing but it's not even close to supporting the type of WORA support that Java enjoys today. Write Once, Debug Everywhere used to be the joke about Java but today WORA has really come true there. Hopefully, one day Mono with get there but I doubt it will because it's not in Microsoft interest.

Sun and Oracle actually work with the open source community, Microsoft attempts to subvert it wherever it can.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[shutdown -p now]

(Primarily a .NET developer myself)

No nullable primitive types.

They have them for primitive types, actually, and had for ages - java.lang.Integer for int etc.

Since Java, unlike .NET, doesn't have user-defined value types, they didn't need to come up with an extensible scheme to derive a nullable type from any random value type. And for a fixed set of primitive types, it's easier to just hardcode the reference type wrappers.

Not sure if you can use a string for a switch statement

You can't. There are some plans for Java 7, apparently.

Do you have attributes? Instead of the ugly getters and setters?

If you mean "properties", then no, they don't have them.

If you mean "attributes" in the .NET meaning of the word, then they have them in form of @Annotations.

What about nice nestable master pages?

It's a library issue, not a language issue. And it's not even the core library.

Besides, have you seen how many web frameworks there are out there for Java?

Reason #2: Standard Library Source Code Availability - Java source code for the core libraries are available in every J2SDK distribution, .NET sources can only be seen by resorting to illegal means

Actually, .NET sources have been available for close to 2 years now, for debugging and exploration purposes. You can't redistribute, or even modify & recompile them locally, though.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[ultranova]

I think Mono is a good thing but it's not even close to supporting the type of WORA support that Java enjoys today.

Unfortunately, now that Oracle has acquired Sun, I'm pretty sure Java will be perverted and tied into Oracle's database products. Oh well, it's about time to learn LISP anyway...

Write Once, Debug Everywhere used to be the joke about Java but today WORA has really come true there.

Well, it would if developers stopped using look and feel changer to emulate the host system. At least the GTK version is hopelessly buggy, and more often than not crashes.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[binarylarry]

Yeah hopefully Oracle maintains the status quo but Ellison definitely has the Blofeld vibe to him.

I prefer SWT myself. I don't like Swing much in any of it's forms.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[DarkOx]

If ORACLE tries to tie Java to their database as you suggest it would kill Java. Java is one of their more valuable properties, it was probably THE reason to buy Sun. ORACLE is not stupid they won't do that.

To much of the Java ecosystem is on IBM iron and talking to DB2. ORACLE would much rather have thriving Java community then pick up a tiny number of database sales.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[Tim C]

No nullable primitive types.

They have them for primitive types, actually, and had for ages - java.lang.Integer for int etc.

No, that's not the same thing. Integer (and Long, etc) are objects, not primitives. The GP's point was that in Java you can't say e.g.

int i = null;

I've not tried that (and don't have a JDK installed on this machine) but I would expect a compile-time error. (I've not tried it in C# either for that matter)

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[shutdown -p now]

That is the same thing in terms of semantics. In C#, you cannot say "int x = null", either. You can say "int? x = null", which is syntactic sugar for "System.Nullable = null", and Nullable is a wrapper which adds null to the domain of values of any value type. It has to be done that way in C# because the set of value types is open, whereas in Java it's restricted to primitives, so you can provide a separate wrapper for each.

There is a difference in that Nullable itself is a value type - basically T itself plus a boolean flag to indicate nullness. However, this is for the most part just implementation detail - from programmer's perspective, end result is the same.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[ickoonite]

You can't do:

int i = null;

...in C# either. You can do:

int? i = null;

...though. I was sceptical at first, but it is a genuinely useful way of indicating the absence of a value when dealing with, for example, stuff that has come out of a database.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[ickoonite]

Not sure if you can use a string for a switch statement

This is just syntactic sugar in .NET actually. If you look at the IL it compiles to, for short switch blocks, it's a set of if statements; for longer ones, it creates a Dictionary and then does TryGetValue.

Re:Off Topic but your sig is 6 years old

[thetoadwarrior]

.Net really cross platform no matter what people say about Mono and it's been developed by a convicted monopolist to further tie people to their shitty operating system.

I'd much rather work in Java and no I can happily take my code anywhere if I tire of my current OS. Hell, I'd rather re-write C / C++ code for another operating system than drink MS' kool-aid and buy into the .Net mess.

How about OpenQuartz?

[iYk6]

No you can't. QuakeLive requires a "browser plugin" which defeats the whole point of playing in a browser. You don't get any of the advantages, like sandboxing, cross-platform, or no installation required.

This article is about running Quake in a browser, which is pretty dang cool, if not really practical. Also, it's not really about Quake or FPS so much as HTML5.

Urban Terror was a good suggestion. They probably could have gotten permission to distribute it if they asked. I would have suggested OpenQuartz, which is GPL. It's only half a level, but that's plenty for a demo.

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get any of the advantages, like sandboxing, cross-platform

You think complex html+javascript endeavors will actually work the same in different browsers/platforms? You're funny..

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[TheNetAvenger]

Also, it's not really about Quake or FPS so much as HTML5.

No, in fact this is almost ANTI HTML5.

The only HTML5 here is the final rendering is occuring in an HTML5 Canvas. This is NOT HTML5 and this is not truly running the game in a browser as you suggest as it is relying on WebGL and other libraries to produce a final render to the HTML5 Canvas.

If this was an HTML5 demonstration, it would be using PNGs, SVG, and CSS to create the game not just rendering to a square HTML5 canvas element.

On Windows Vista or Windows7, I could write code in a couple of minutes using the DWM (Thumbnail preview) that without a pluging that could render Mass Effect 2 or any game or application to an HTML5 Canvas.

HTML5 is about breaking OUTSIDE the Canvas/BOX based rendering that Flash and ActiveX and JAVA are all designed around, as they have no INTERACTION with the other elements on the page beyond the CANVAS. And this example is just as limited as well.

This is a Google, "we can't do high performance HTML5 dynamic content," so we are going to get some press by rendering with the GPU to the HTML 5 canvas. Wow, almost as impressive as using activex rendering DirectX content that we first saw in the freaking 1990s.

The trick between the no plug-in comparison is they are using the HTML5 canvas instead of a plug-in, which is disturbing that anyone thinks this is impressive or fundamentally different. WebGL embedded in a browser or used as a plug-in is NOT the browser's rendering engine doing the work. If Microsoft embeds XBAP or Silverlights rendering engines into IE and then uses the HTML5 canvas to display the content, does this make WPF/.NET/Silverlight all HTML5 and browser rendered too? NO...

Get it?

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[SanityInAnarchy]

WebGL and other libraries

WebGL isn't a library, it's a binding. It does bind to native OpenGL (if the browser supports that), and while it may not be strictly HTML5, it is in line with the HTML5 goals -- to make the browser itself the platform, without relying on plugins.

If this was an HTML5 demonstration, it would be using PNGs, SVG, and CSS to create the game

Fair enough, though that would be much slower.

Wow, almost as impressive as using activex rendering DirectX content that we first saw in the freaking 1990s.

Yes, because ActiveX is a nice, cross-platform standard with multiple open source implementations... Oh wait.

Read that again until it sinks in, by the way.

Cross-platform -- WebGL runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X, at the very least, and likely on the iPhone. Your attempt to pretend this is a Google-vs-the-world thing falls flat.

Standard -- WebGL is managed by Khronos, who maintains OpenGL itself -- the working group includes Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Opera.

Multiple open-source implementations -- Firefox and Chromium both support it in some dev build or other. That also means Gecko and Webkit, which means dozens of other browsers.

WebGL embedded in a browser or used as a plug-in is NOT the browser's rendering engine doing the work.

So what?

And for what it's worth, it is useful that it ends up on a Canvas. Unless I'm mistaken, that means it is composited with the rest of the document, meaning you could (for example) draw your HUD using standard HTML and only use the GL for the 3D. Please explain why this is a bad thing.

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[TheNetAvenger]

WebGL isn't a library, it's a binding. It does bind to native OpenGL (if the browser supports that)...it is in line with the HTML5 goals

Yes, and if the browser doesn't support it, it is a plugin. Again if Microsoft 'embeds' Silverlight into IE then because it is no longer a plugin and 'it is in line with HTML5 goals'? And according to your definition, Silverlight is also crossplatform, as it runs on...

Windows, Linux, and OS X, at the very least, and likely on the iPhone

as well. (Yes iPhone is a stretch as technically it is just being used to re-encode video at the server side for now.)

And for what it's worth, it is useful that it ends up on a Canvas. Unless I'm mistaken, that means it is composited with the rest of the document, meaning you could (for example) draw your HUD using standard HTML and only use the GL for the 3D. Please explain why this is a bad thing.

The canvas isn't bad, the point is that it ends up being an external rendering to a square space.

HTML5 is trying to break from square box controls and external standards. If of an SVG circle or triangle and text flowing around it, this is the direction not square canvases that use masking tricks to fit on the page in anything but a 'box'.

You also have the object access level, and WebGL is wrapped in code, you can't reach out and set the transparecy of an 'internal' object being rendered in the scene outside via CSS. Again this is opposite of the HTML5 goals, where SVG and Video and everything that are objects should be accessible to CSS and other objects on the page.

Final note...

I don't dislike WebGL, although I would rather put more effort into getting GPU accelerated browsers rather than adding in WebGL to basically embed 3D accelerated objects into a page. Having SVG and other good things of HTML5 and dynamic rendering running on the GPU already then there really isn't a need for WebGL.

What bothers me about this article and news story is that Google and users are acting like Chrome is rendering Quake in HTML5, which it is not doing, it is only doing the final paint to an HTML5 canvas. This is not a demonstration of HTML5 or Chrome being good at HTML5.

In fact if you look at HTML5 concept pages, even the ones from MS's IE9 work, Chrome can barely render them at 1fps on a high end system, where a browser that is inherently GPU assisted (like IE9) can run the demos easily on a Netbook with 30fps without even breathing hard.

Seriously check out:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Default.html

Yes these are Microsoft based tests, but they bring up important points that Google and Firefox and everyone needs to be thinking about, because without taking all of the rendering to the GPU HTML5 will be crappy and/or make IE9 the king of the web, which really will suck.

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yes, and if the browser doesn't support it, it is a plugin.

All of HTML5 is also a plugin on IE, called Chrome Frame. That's not the relevant issue. The relevant issue is whether it's a standard we can agree on.

Again if Microsoft 'embeds' Silverlight into IE then because it is no longer a plugin and 'it is in line with HTML5 goals'?

They'd also have to irrevocably release all the relevant patents, and there'd still only be the one open source implementation.

There's also no particularly compelling need for Silverlight, when HTML5 presents a much more transparent way to handle video and audio, which is the main reason you'd need Silverlight in the first place.

And according to your definition, Silverlight is also crossplatform, as it runs on...

iPhone is indeed a stretch. OS X and Windows have native implementations from Microsoft, making that about as useful as Flash.

There is thus a total of one open source implementation (Mono), and there's still the issue of patents and of relevance.

HTML5 is trying to break from square box controls and external standards. If of an SVG circle or triangle and text flowing around it, this is the direction not square canvases that use masking tricks to fit on the page in anything but a 'box'.

Then how would you suggest supporting high-performance hardware-accelerated 3D rendering in that environment?

I can think of a few ways to get similar effects, but I don't know that I can think of a use case.

Let me put it another way: <video> is also part of HTML5 and also generally a 'box'. Can you think of how it could be any other way?

You also have the object access level, and WebGL is wrapped in code, you can't reach out and set the transparecy of an 'internal' object being rendered in the scene outside via CSS.

That is a legitimate criticism. I'm not sure there's a good answer, though, especially one that doesn't have serious performance implications.

I don't dislike WebGL, although I would rather put more effort into getting GPU accelerated browsers...

There's still a question of how to render 3D.

Having SVG and other good things of HTML5 and dynamic rendering running on the GPU already then there really isn't a need for WebGL.

That depends what you're doing. Would you really attempt to build a game like Quake that way? Using a 2D SVG, doing all the perspective work and occlusion culling yourself instead of letting OpenGL handle it?

What bothers me about this article and news story is that Google and users are acting like Chrome is rendering Quake in HTML5, which it is not doing, it is only doing the final paint to an HTML5 canvas. This is not a demonstration of HTML5 or Chrome being good at HTML5.

Also fair, it would've been nice if they specified WebGL instead of HTML5, as the way it's worded now suggests WebGL is part of HTML5, which it's not.

I suppose I'm a bit impatient. What bothers me the most about this is that we had the technology to do this in 1999 -- to make something like a web browser that would really be an application-browser -- and I've been waiting a long time to make a truly web-based videogame. This has a shot at it -- if your browser already has WebGL enabled, I could streamline a game to load your starting point within the world in seconds.

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[TheNetAvenger]

I wish I had time to continue this conversation fully.

One thing of note to think about:

Let me put it another way: video is also part of HTML5 and also generally a 'box'. Can you think of how it could be any other way?

Yes I can. With Video there are basic properties that are standard elements that can be accessed via CSS, although Chrome does not properly handle them yet. (Chrome doesn't even handle applying things like CSS transparency to a video object properly yet.)

Because there are things 'known' about the basics of a video they can and should be accessible in HTML5.

With a Canvas, there is a limited set of 'known' things about the canvas, being pretty much the box, with no knowledge or control of what is in the box.

The difference is why HTML5 video is important, because if there was no difference, there would be no need for any HTML5 video standards exposed in the DOM and the specification would be to just use a generic canvas object with X,Y, or Z codec.

This is even a good example of why the individual standards are important and their 'interaction/mingling' is important to making HTML5 happen.

Google should really be looking at treating all HTML5 content like they treat WebGL, and heck even use OpenGL to render HTML5 on the hardware, as it is a far better solution and significantly more progessive that just exposing an OpenGL subset to be painted on a canvas instead. They can still work with WebGL or other 3D viewport concepts, but can flip them out in XML and know their browser will have the hardware performance to handle it, which is where things like VRML failed in the past.

As I said before, I truly hope Google and all the other browser players 'get it' or we will see a world where IE9 becomes preferred for advanced HTML5 content and will either make IE king again or kill good HTML5 progress on the web.

Take care and thanks for the comments.

Re:How about OpenQuartz?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I said before, I truly hope Google and all the other browser players 'get it' or we will see a world where IE9 becomes preferred for advanced HTML5 content and will either make IE king again or kill good HTML5 progress on the web.

Firefox is likely to have a release out with hardware accelerated rendering before IE9's release. See:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/04/layers.html
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/01/18/layers-cross-platform-acceleration
http://www.basschouten.com/blog1.php/2010/03/02/presenting-direct2d-hardware-acceleratio

Die Flash games!

[GreatDrok]

The thing that is killing my old iBook G4 are the bloody Flash games that my wife wants to run on it. The thing is still perfectly capable of doing most stuff but Flash is such a resource hog and the OS X version of Flash so poorly optimised, especially since they released Flash 10 for Mac which made the PPC performance much worse. I'm tempted to get an iPad but the lack of Flash would upset her indoors but I think lack of Flash is a bonus. Anyway, if all these Flash game writers started porting over to HTML5 once it is finalised then the lack of Flash will not be an issue. Oh, and Steve Jobs will have done us all a great service in releasing the iPad without Flash and ending it's tyrannical reign.

Re:Die Flash games!

[Firehawke]

Simply isn't going to happen until someone writes a development environment on par with Flash's, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Chicken and egg problem. There's no interest in moving off Flash until the tools are there and nobody wants to write tools until there's interest in them.

Re:Die Flash games!

[Moochman]

Well the lack of tools is certainly a gap in the market that some party could cash in on right now with a pretty big payoff long-run.

This makes it look like GWT is becoming a candidate. Also based on some of the assertions made recently by Adobe in the vein of "we're in the creative tools business, not the technologies business" I think they may jump on board the HTML5 train soon as well.

Re:Die Flash games!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah cuz her iBook reaches out and steals CPU resources from whatever computer you're using, right?
(point being, what a pointless rant you've made! If your wife enjoys the games, who gives a fuck?!)

Re:Die Flash games!

[GravityStar]

Adobe itself could put a "render as html 5" function in Flash CS 5.

Re:Die Flash games!

[VGPowerlord]

The thing that is killing my old iBook G4 are the bloody Flash games that my wife wants to run on it. The thing is still perfectly capable of doing most stuff but Flash is such a resource hog and the OS X version of Flash so poorly optimised, especially since they released Flash 10 for Mac which made the PPC performance much worse. I'm tempted to get an iPad but the lack of Flash would upset her indoors but I think lack of Flash is a bonus. Anyway, if all these Flash game writers started porting over to HTML5 once it is finalised then the lack of Flash will not be an issue. Oh, and Steve Jobs will have done us all a great service in releasing the iPad without Flash and ending it's tyrannical reign.

You know, your problem could be in part that you're using a computer that is somewhere between 800Mhz-1.42Ghz with only 256-512 MB RAM. According to Wikipedia anyway.

HTML5 stuff isn't going to work any better on that model than Flash does now. Probably worse.

Re:Die Flash games!

[JackAxe]

They could, but that would limit export to basically ActionScript 2(Big step back from AS3) with a drawing API that's closer to what could be done with Flash 7(Which compared to the current AS3 Drawing API is quite limiting). But it would be a nice feature none the less, just like CS5's option to compile iPhone applications.

Re:Die Flash games!

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply isn't going to happen until someone writes a development environment on par with Flash's, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Chicken and egg problem. There's no interest in moving off Flash until the tools are there and nobody wants to write tools until there's interest in them.

What about the HTML5/javascript version of Processing (http://processingjs.org/)?

It can provably do everything Flash can (and better)...

Saved Page For Offline...

[Xin Jing]

I wonder if a browser game like this would work if you saved the page for offline access.

Re:Saved Page For Offline...

[ducomputergeek]

I'm not sure about android and chrome, but in the iPhone + Safari, there is away to make your web apps downloadable and useable offline.

Good job Jobs!

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is, Apple should get the credit for this. After all, if not for the iPod's brave refusal to use Flash, these Google employees would NEVER have wasted their time on this.

Re:Good job Jobs!

[gangien]

yeah because they wouldn't have wanted to show off their GWT stuff...

Although, this was more of a, this sounds like a neat hack, let's do it, than anything else.

Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[mrspecialhead]

It may be hard to understand the significance of this if you are not immersed in the hell that is web front-end engineering. Javascript in isolation is not as bad a language as people make it out to be, but supporting common browsers and fixing all bugs as you're writing it is terrible. It is an incredibly hostile development environment.

The dream, from a developer's perspective, is this: In 3-5 years (this is the dream part given how fast the web changes), Javascript is an assembly language. You don't write it unless you really need to dig down to the "bare metal" of the browser itself. You compile to it from your language of choice. Your compiler spits out Javascript and any HTML/CSS containers required to skin your app and allow it to render in the browser. Your application can be linked to and run directly in the browser with no Flash, no Unity3d, no JavaFX, no plugins or installation required.

That no plugins are required is incredibly significant from the perspective of a company trying to distribute a product to as many people as they can, as cheaply as they can. Losing 20% of potential users because you required an installation of them is unacceptable--this increases your marketing costs by at least 25% and dampens the spread of your application via word of mouth, email, Facebook sharing, or whatever viral channels you happen to be using. This is why new 3D browser plugins are not succeeding. Unless it's Flash, no one has the plugin you need and you can't get them to install it reliably enough.

As someone who is frequently made miserable by having to support stupid browser oddities, I would kill to be able to write an application in Python, C#, or Java and know that I can compile to a package supported by >90% of people on the web. Yes, running complex stuff in Javascript is slow. But as seen in Chrome and Firefox, it's getting faster. Much like writing in assembly versus higher-level languages, writing Javascript directly will always be faster than compiling from another language. But at what cost to your time and sanity?

In 2010, my real options for rich content on the web are (1) Javascript/Browser Support Hell and (2) write a Flash application instead. That #1 is so miserable is one of many reasons for Flash's continuing success. The dream shown by this demo and others is that we will get a real Option 3.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[binarylarry]

Let me guess: you're John Dvorak... ?

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[mrspecialhead]

If "ha ha your outlandish prediction will never come true" is what you are trying to say, I'm not sure how you got that from my post. I described the problem with rich web application development as I see it from my own experience, and the way I would love to see the web evolve in order to fix it. It's a dream, as I said. There are definitely a lot of other ways this could go.

One possibility is that Adobe adds a ton of new capabilities to Flash and either (1) Adobe's SDK is good enough by itself and everyone writes for Flex/Actionscript directly, or (2) the same thing I described above happens with developers compiling to Actionscript as the world's new assembly language. In either case, Adobe continues to rule the world. It could happen. I'd much rather not have them as a middle-man in the space I'm working in, but it would be better than today's status quo.

What other possibilities are left? Rich web content being a passing fad and everyone moving on to something else? The games industry would love for this one to be the case, but they don't believe it. For evidence, ask EA who they just bought or who they're buying next.

In the short term, obviously nothing changes. More than 80% of my users are on IE7 and IE8, and that's probably not going to budge until the next major release of Windows. So, again, this is a dream. But damn, it would be nice to have it come true sooner rather than later.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[icebraining]

Tried Pyjamas?

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[mrspecialhead]

Yep, I've experimented with pyjs and with GWT itself. This and other similar projects are incredibly exciting. The missing link for rich content is being able to reliably do with the resultant browser code what an standalone game can do with its graphics/sound/IO libraries. Widespread HTML5 adoption plus a good framework to support using it would hopefully get us all the way there. I can't wait, personally. Thanks for the link.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[Khalid]

This is exactly how ZK Framework and GWT work, you just write you programs in Java and they generate Javascript for you while taking into account browsers incompatiblities and indeed I believe it's the future if Web development.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[TwinkieStix]

I agree that Javascript is quickly becoming an assembly language. GWT (the tooling Google used to get Quake running in Javascript) is exactly that. Java code is compiled to "native" Javascript.

Although, what you say about browser oddities is largely irrelevant with the usage of toolkits like jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, etc. Instead of targeting the Javascript DOM API, you target your toolkit's API. The DOM API is the part that differs between browsers, except for a few very rare cases. Targeting a toolkit's API is a thinner way to abstract the differences between browsers instead of inheriting the overhead of compiling one language to another before running against a machine. For instance, managing C++ pointers in a language with built in garbage collection is probably not the most performant process.

Additionally, there is a subset of the actual language that some consider the "good part" from which you can also target at the language level. This is a great book about how to do that:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript as assembly language... Thinking like this is why it takes the same amount of time to start the word processor on my 2.6GHz dual-core machine/8GiB RAM as on my homebrew 10MHz Z80 with 512KiB RAM (paged, the Z80 has a 16-bit address bus)

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

Indeed. I am all for the idea of separating further in the browser: design, code, and data, but moving that way should be moving away from JS as the de facto language of the web, not increasing reliance on a poorly applied language. JS is not well designed for its purpose as the programming language of the web, and certainly not implemented in a standard way. Don't get me wrong, I have grown to love JavaScript, it is very nice to code in if you are rigorous with what subset of it you use, and especially with jQuery it is a very nice environment to program for, if not a very efficient or reliable one.

We should be moving towards some kind of assembly language for the web, something that compiles to byte-code. But if JavaScript is still around then, JS should be compiling to that byte code, not higher level languages compiling to JS. As a web developer, I would really like to see more languages supported in the browser, especially domain specific languages, and compiling to some sort of web-specific byte code is the way to go there.

Of course, whatever we can convince the browser makers to better in that regard, is better than nothing -- including compiling to JS, IFF that has to be an intermediary step.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[mrspecialhead]

Correct and I mostly agree with you. I am a big fan of both jQuery and Crockford's work (and I own his book and second your recommendation for anyone driven insane by Javascript itself), and they go a long way toward making things easier.

The problem is that libraries like jQuery and Dojo only completely solve cross-browser issues if you can limit yourself to the interfaces they support and also avoid the elements of HTML/CSS that aren't regulated by your library and happen to cause popular browsers to barf. Your scripts are protected, but not your markup, and unfortunately in practice you often end up with requirements that run you up against markup issues despite your having the best of intentions compatibility-wise.

"I hate iframes and don't want to use one, but it's the fastest way to get this feature out." You use jQuery for all of your scripting and DOM manipulation, and everything is beautiful. Then you discover fifty compatibility issues with iframes in Browser AYIII involving style changes not propagating as a result of the iframe being moved/shown and child elements of the document not showing up properly as a result. Stuff like this.

In The Future, when we can avoid the markup as well, I will be a happy monkey.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[Anonymous Coward]

We should be moving towards some kind of assembly language for the web, something that compiles to byte-code.

try searching for "Google Native Client"

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[mrspecialhead]

Completely agreed, especially on actually compiling to bytecode. Fortunately we're already getting past even that, in some browsers at least: http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme/

I would love it if we could tear out Javascript and replace it with something better designed and better performing in every major browser. Unfortunately we're stuck with it for the near future. In 7-10 years, maybe all browsers will be running Python. That would be pretty sweet in my book at least. =)

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[SanityInAnarchy]

The dream, from a developer's perspective, is this: In 3-5 years (this is the dream part given how fast the web changes), Javascript is an assembly language.

What? No, you had it right here:

Javascript in isolation is not as bad a language as people make it out to be,

Full stop. In fact, it's quite a pleasant language. The unpleasantness comes from this:

supporting common browsers

And that can be abstracted away with libraries.

What JavaScript needs is libraries, frameworks, and abstraction, not other languages stacked on top of it. More JQuery, Prototype, and SproutCore, and less Google Web Toolkit, Pyjamas, and HotRuby.

and fixing all bugs as you're writing it

I have no idea what you mean here.

I would kill to be able to write an application in Python, C#, or Java and know that I can compile to a package supported by >90% of people on the web.

Well, that's exactly what Google Web Toolkit is, but again, I'd suggest looking into JavaScript libraries instead.

Much like writing in assembly versus higher-level languages, writing Javascript directly will always be faster than compiling from another language. But at what cost to your time and sanity?

Not nearly as much as assembly language.

Again, it's the language. JavaScript is a decent language. Assembly Language... isn't. No matter how many frameworks you pile on top of ASM, it's not going to be pretty until you at least add a hell of a preprocessor, and at some point, we call that preprocessor a "compiler". By contrast, I've written things very quickly in JQuery, kept my sanity, and had it working easily in Chrome, Firefox, and IE, without testing in more than Chrome while developing -- it Just Worked in Firefox and IE. (And Safari, I assume.)

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

I'm talking about byte-code (virtual machines). Not compiling to native code that runs in a browser (and requires a plug-in to do so). Google Native Client is a step in the wrong direction, IMHO. Native apps are native apps. The web should be, ideally, a processor and OS neutral framework for development... and I don't even want to think of the security issues that a wide-spread adoption of running native code in the browser would bring -- just look at ActiveX. What would be best is a standard that truly separates data, presentation, and code. It should be one that is designed with that specifically in mind. A virtual machine/byte-code that is designed specifically to work with well-defined data and presentation layers would advance that goal by leaps and bounds. CSS 3 and HTML 5 are moving the web forward, in many important ways, but the method for interacting with the data and presentation layers of the web is stuck in 1999.

We need something as inventive and world-changing as the move from FTP/Gopher to HTTP.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

Even Python, as much as I love to write in it, is the wrong answer for the web. Really, we need to have a standardized byte-code/virtual machine implemented (gasp, identically!) over all browsers :) Then for your standard situations you could choose whatever you wanted -- Python, JavaScript, etc. And for applications where it was advisable, you could pick Erlang or Haskell, etc., or hell, even Logo, if you wanted! It wouldn't matter! We'd be free to create compiler for whatever language we chose that target that virtual machine.

Projects such as SquirrelFish are great, because I think they will show the world exactly what the benefits of a virtual machine for the web will be. Once projects like it are incorporated into the browser, it is a relatively small step to abstract away from JavaScript and support any language that has a compiler targeting this VM. If you are interested there is a very interesting discussion on Lambda that addressed this and similar projects, and the trade-offs and advantages of different JIT implementations :)

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

The nice thing about an assembly language for the web is that it could compile to byte-code run by a standardized virtual machine (which can be further abstracted to be a compatible, thin layer between the language and the processor). You are right - browsers running native code is a horrible idea, and a step backwards. JavaScript is a fine language, and jQuery makes it a dream to write JS code, but we should have more options than that, especially where other niche languages have an advantage. We could start coding the web in whatever language we choose - be it a functional language, or a domain-specific language, or a language designed for multiple cores/processors, etc. The latter could be unnecessary if the compiler were advanced enough to support concurrency automatically. I am not a compiler designer, but from what I can tell that has been a rather elusive goal with most traditional OO and procedural languages.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cecom]

Ahem. Do you realize how fundamentally and permanently slow JavaScript really is? Whether it is a "good" or a "bad" language is beside the point; it is basically unoptimizeable. JITs and advanced complication techniques may improve its performance compared to a dumb interpreter, but it is important to look on the absolute scale, where it will remain truly awful. (Not to mention that JITs are in fact quite limited in what they can really do) This is a horrible basis for future development, although the idea does seem appealing at the intellectual level. It means that the browser will forever remain a "secondary" platform. That said, I have to agree that it would still be much better than the horrible mess we have today.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[SanityInAnarchy]

The nice thing about an assembly language for the web is that it could compile to byte-code run by a standardized virtual machine (which can be further abstracted to be a compatible, thin layer between the language and the processor).

Maybe, but JavaScript is simultaneously a horrible choice for such a language, and an excellent choice for an application development language.

we should have more options than that, especially where other niche languages have an advantage.

Can you give an example?

a language designed for multiple cores/processors

JavaScript can do that now, and it does so with message-passing. Functional languages might be interesting to try that way, but I'm not sure how efficiently they can map to a message-passing system. Erlang, maybe, but it's fundamentally an uglier language than JavaScript -- the good thing about Erlang is the VM.

The latter could be unnecessary if the compiler were advanced enough to support concurrency automatically. I am not a compiler designer,

Neither am I, but I doubt it can be done well.

Actually, CPUs do something like this already, and compilers could, I'm just skeptical about the results. Take a simple for loop iterating over an array and updating each element. How would a compiler be able to infer that to a map function, unless it's hand-optimized for specific types of for loops?

Basically, I think that if we do start talking about an "assembly language for the Web", we should go ahead and try to build one. I wouldn't know where to begin, though, to be honest -- there are two many different models to support. The only real problem I see for Javascript in the near future is multicore, and I think it's manageable, and again, with libraries and frameworks (building on top of Web Workers) rather than with a brand-new language.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

Well... you are good with the tag, but aside from that you completely missed what I said.

Can you give an example?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[Hurricane78]

Man, this is so deeply deeply wrong on so many levels, that I can’t even begin to desribe it!

A browser scripting language becoming assempler?? What’s next? I can’t even think of something, perverse enough to beat that!
Why not just simulate a CPU on X, where X = a simulated CPU on X, until all your resources are used up?

Enough with porting everything to the browser! It is idiocy of the highest order! Learn your inner platform anti-pattern!

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[SanityInAnarchy]

I prefer internal DSLs (like JQuery) to external DSLs.

But that's not an example, that's still a general statement. Can you give an example where you actually want an external DSL in a web app which isn't already part of the stack somehow (like CSS)?

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

I'm saying it would nice to have a choice to program for the web in whatever language you want; it would be nice to be able to program in anything that has a compiler that targets "the web," and to have your code compile directly to a standardized byte-code, instead of compiling to JavaScript. There's really no reason that JavaScript should be the only language supported by browsers. Using a byte-code based VM would negate the need for browsers to support more than one language: anyone could create compilers that target that byte-code, and we could use whatever language we want.

The reasons for using DSLs, functional languages, or other OO languages are as numerous for the web as they are for any other application platform. And I'll say again, I like JavaScript, especially with jQuery, but JavaScript should not be the only choice when developing applications that run in a standard browser (without plug-ins).

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[SanityInAnarchy]

There's really no reason that JavaScript should be the only language supported by browsers.

Nothing except inertia, which does matter.

Using a byte-code based VM would negate the need for browsers to support more than one language: anyone could create compilers that target that byte-code, and we could use whatever language we want.

Ah, but which one? No matter which one you choose, it's going to have issues. In fact, there are even advantages to a higher-level language to begin with -- while it's a lot harder to map any generic language onto JavaScript, it's a lot easier to swap out everything under the hood and optimize it.

So, doing it at a lower level (with bytecode), you get more languages that would work decently well, but less flexibility in how you optimize them.

Just look at any of the non-Java-like languages that target the JVM, and the incredible hoops they have to jump through.

That's why I'm actually not entirely opposed to one direction Google seems to be moving in -- sandboxed native code. That way, you could use any language you want, so long as it plays nice with the sandbox and supports the browser's API. The downside is that you're tied to a single CPU architecture (or anything that can quickly emulate it), which seems like a serious problem.

I don't really see a good solution here, and JavaScript seems like a reasonable trade-off.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

You are assuming that JavaScript is the language best suited for the web -- that is not true. I'm not talking about what is probable to happen. That's a fine way to think for the present, but you are really missing the big picture here. JavaScript is already being compiled to byte-code, in many implementations, with great success. The idea that this byte-code couldn't ever be redesigned is quite a bit short-sighted. The idea that a fast VM that supports many different languages couldn't be used in the browser is just nonsense. In so much as a VM more or less does the same thing as hardware machine does, it should be clear that a VM can support multiple languages just fine. Take a look at LLVM or other similar projects. And, there are many variegated types of languages that successfully target VMs -- whether JVM, the CLR, or otherwise. That's not even really an issue, as any VM designed for use in the browser could be made to play nice with many languages by not requiring garbage collection, supporting tail calls, etc.

I don't really see a good solution here, and JavaScript seems like a reasonable trade-off.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but my point is that is a far from optimal approach. HTML 5 and CSS 3 are truly advancing the state of the web; it's time that the code aspect of the web took similarly large steps forward. GWT is just a compromise to overcome the shortfalls of JavaScript. That's fine if you don't care to dream.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[SanityInAnarchy]

JavaScript is already being compiled to byte-code, in many implementations

So is Perl5 and Ruby, and neither of those provide any sort of convenient ways of getting at that bytecode representation.

The idea that a fast VM that supports many different languages couldn't be used in the browser is just nonsense.

The question is, again, which one? The idea that a universal bytecode could be built which efficiently supports every language seems a bit far-fetched.

Take a look at LLVM or other similar projects.

I have.

In fact, someone corrected me about the viability of cross-platform LLVM bytecode. Apparently, the bytecode itself isn't cross-platform.

And, there are many variegated types of languages that successfully target VMs -- whether JVM, the CLR, or otherwise.

And what tortured hacks do some of them have to perform to work well on one vs another? The JVM doesn't support tail-calls particularly well, but the CLR seems to have tons of stuff (at least in libraries, if nothing else) heavily tied to Windows, plus that sticky patent issue.

The question is whether you could actually do this:

any VM designed for use in the browser could be made to play nice with many languages by not requiring garbage collection, supporting tail calls, etc.

In other words, you're assuming that there could be a sufficiently fast, low-level, cross-platform, cross-language VM. I'm pointing out that as far as I can tell, no such beast exists, and I don't know enough to say that it could.

Also, it does preclude allowing the user to make a number of webpages faster simply by upgrading their browser, the lower level you get -- for example, if you wanted to try a newer, better garbage collector, you'd have to upgrade all websites, rather than just the browser.

There is also the issue, for better or worse, of source code being available for JavaScript.

that is a far from optimal approach.

I just don't see that the other approaches (including yours) are sufficiently better than this one to merit the enormous effort it would take to get it implemented.

GWT is just a compromise to overcome the shortfalls of JavaScript.

I disagree -- I think GWT is a perversion built by people who don't understand the strengths of JavaScript.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[cromar]

In so much as a virtual machine mimics, more or less, a hardware machine, there is no reason one could not be developed to do all these things in the context of the browser (which is already more or less a standardized application platform). From the response you quote:

Unfortunately, the bitcode is non-portable because it has architecture-specific constants from C/C++ header files baked in (not to mention linkage against system libraries).

This wouldn't be an issue on browsers, as you would only be targeting one architecture: the browser. I'm not saying the LLVM could do all of these things: I'm saying that it is very close to what I am talking about. Of course there is not something that does these things already. I am talking about the future.

But I digress. I am not asking you to work on these ideas. The fact that you won't consider their merit as the web continues to evolve is not a reason to continue this discussion.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[SanityInAnarchy]

The fact that you won't consider their merit as the web continues to evolve is not a reason to continue this discussion.

There's an important distinction between refusing to consider, and discarding after consideration. In fact, my first reaction on returning to web development was, why not use a virtual machine?

It was only after a lot of research, looking for the perfect language and virtual machine, that I realized that neither of those exist, and furthermore, I'm not convinced either of them can exist. Because of that, any VM we standardized on would be about as flawed as any language we standardize on.

I did acknowledge one possible advantage (or disadvantage) of a VM -- bytecode is less transparent than script, so proprietary web apps are feasible.

This isn't an attempt to continue the discussion, I just resent that, after all that, you're accusing me of not even considering your idea. I thought that's what we were doing.

Re:Javascript is becoming an assembly language

[mgiuca]

My dream is that JavaScript is replaced by an assembly language.

If nobody is actually writing code in this extremely high-level language, then why do we have a high level language? If JavaScript is to be the assembly language of the next decade, then the whole "RISC is better than CISC" has been MASSIVELY inverted -- JavaScript is WAY higher up the CISC scale than x86 assembly.

The way we are going, we'll have high-level languages compiling into another dynamic, possibly higher-level language (JavaScript) which is then optimised to hell and back by the client, which is stupid and not perfect. It is absurd that GWT compiles (relatively) efficient, static Java into completely untyped dynamic JavaScript and then Chrome is forced to optimise it again -- poor Google are forced to completely round-trip the code because the standards are sucky.

I hope that one day soon, JavaScript will be replaced by a platform-neutral source-language-neutral object code (possibly Parrot) which already allows for optimisations.

Totally going to hook this up with an iPad

[subanark]

The iPad doesn't support Flash, but it does support HTML5 , so we can totally Quake II on the iPad... because you know we can... and have lots of money and free time.

Re:Totally going to hook this up with an iPad

[Moochman]

The iPad doesn't support Flash, but it does support HTML5 , so we can totally Quake II on the iPad... because you know we can... and have lots of money and free time.

I am rich
I deserv it
I am good,
healthy &
successful

Re:Totally going to hook this up with an iPad

[Viewsonic]

Can anyone confirm that this would work on the iPad? I mean, any HTML5 compliant browser should be able to run this shouldn't it? The iPhone/ITouch? (Granted a slide show) .. Just curious.

Re:Totally going to hook this up with an iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

It would technically work, but it would be horribly slow, even on the iPad. Don't even try it on iPhone/iPod touch.
This is simply a demonstration of what HTML5 is capable of, it is not meant to be seriously played by anyone, especially not on mediocre hardware.

Make a new level!

[crhylove]

There's GOT to be some good levels, characters, weapons available under Creative Commons. How about stealing some from OpenArena?

Re:Make a new level!

[Turzyx]

Stealing?... Careful...

Re:Make a new level!

[Weslee]

Stealing from OpenArena - which is also GPL.
So, stealing meaning use their resources, but not stealing as in copyright theft.

Re:Make a new level!

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenArena is based on ioquake3, which is based on id Tech 3 AKA Quake III engine, not Quake II. In other words, it wouldn't work without more effort than it's worth.

Re:Make a new level!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stealing from OpenArena wouldn't be useful as Quake3 is not Quake2. The formats of the textures, models, and maps, are completely different as they are MD3, Q3BSP and TGA/JPEG and one does not simply convert them down to MD2, Q2BSP and WAL.

MD2 doesn't have tags
Q2BSP doesn't have independent texture scaling and curved surfaces/beziers
WAL does not have alpha channels or 24/32bit color and is restricted to a fixed palette
Most importantly: no shader system.

Re:Make a new level!

[JohnnyBGod]

I think you'll have a hard time finding a level that doesn't use even a single of the original game assets.

Re:Make a new level!

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenArena isn't based on ioq3, it just ships with it for stand-alone convenience.

The game code and data can still run on vanilla q3 and is intended that way since locking out support for other ports (aka, "evil, stupid, pointless" ports according to ioq3 devs) is a stupid idea for a free data project..

Re:Make a new level!

[crhylove]

Well, a better plan would actually be porting ioquake3, and including the latest speex and OpenAL 3d positioned VOIP. But I'm sure you could down sample the openarena stuff quite easily to a q2 format if you weren't willing to instead bolster the engine.

Re:Make a new level!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Not hard, if you're willing to go to Quake3 games -- Nexuiz, OpenArena, Tremulous, World of Padman...

The question is whether those can be backported to Quake2.

Re:Make a new level!

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't. At least not easily.

Re:Make a new level!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong.The fact that it remains compatible with vanilla id Tech 3 means nothing. It comes with ioquake3, therefore it is an ioquake3 based game.

Wikipedia disagrees with you. Look at what is listed as the engine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openarena

The official OpenArena Wiki also disagrees with you and I quote:

OpenArena is a network enabled multiplayer first person shooter based on the ioquake3 fork of the id tech 3 engine. It features many game types including the traditional deathmatch and sports a varied cast of sadistic characters. Due to violent and occasional racy content it is probably unsuitable for children under the age of 17.

openarena.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Re:Make a new level!

[crhylove]

They could at least have went with a more up to date Q2 codebase, like Quake2evolved, which I know is floating around, and can take Q3 assets.

Re:Make a new level!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Is Quake2evolved Java-based?

Re:Make a new level!

[crhylove]

Riiiiight I forgot about that. However, Whoever ported initially could port it again, I'd think. I just think there are some better engines that might get higher fps at this point. ioquake3 is pretty darned fast.

Re:Make a new level!

[Anonymous Coward]

Either way it involves a port of another engine or conversion of all arts assets.

Re:Make a new level!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Whoever ported initially could port it again, I'd think.

...thus losing most of the advantages of using a newer engine, I'd think.

Re:Make a new level!

[FreonTrip]

Nexuiz isn't Quake III-based. It's built on a fork of the DarkPlaces engine, which itself is a heavily modified, uber-gnarly derivative of the original Quake engine. :)

Time

[Anonymous Coward]

...and Sergey asked of them: "What is that you have so much of on your hands?" and in unison and with a great shout they cried out "TIME!". And Sergey said to them: "You shall take the shootem, not from the land of ego, but from the land of id, and you shall polish it till it shines on the chrome, and you shall take it on safari, and you shall make it follow the law of web compliance. And they went to the land of id which was the place of doom, and took it with them and fit it to the chrome, and took it on safari and they even had the firey fox following after them, for even the fox sought compliance under the web law. But there was no exploder in their midst, for they were not seekers of the web law but kept to their own and wouldn't listen to any other. And they showed it the the netizens present at the dotted slash, and they said behold, look what the Googlers have done with the doom from the land of id, and they marveled at it and karma was burned and even from Soviet Russia they were proclaimed as new overlords.

Re:Time

[instagib]

Mod parent ... uhm ... +1 Creative.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I can run Doom on my SATNAV. This is way cooler, means I will be able to run it on my netbook with ease.

What install?

[Snaller]

If it has to be installed then its not running in the browser.

If it has to be installed we don't need no sticking browser.

As with any "new" technology

[furrymitn]

the age old question of how does it apply in practice: "COOL! But how do I game on it?"

anything quake can do, advertisers can do too

[Anonymous Coward]

*sighs nostalgically for when the most annoying, distracting thing a web designer could put on their page was a blink tag*

486s were faster than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak for Quake, but plenty of DOS based software ran a lot faster faster on my 100 MHz 486-DX than on a similar spec Pentium. Animator Pro did 2x screen averaging SEVENTEEN TIMES FASTER. It depends what hardware a program is optimized for.

PS XTree Gold was much faster on a 286 than any file manager on a Pentium or later.

This is why HTML5 will suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon we will have advertisements and website navigation "taking advantage" of these capabilities. At least now some of the crap can be filtered by just filtering out flash.

Re:Why do I have to install something for a browse

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell me how kickass your HTML5 app is when it won't work out of the box in my HTML5 capable browser.

You wouldn't have to install anything, hypothetically. It's just because they can't release the graphics that you have to. If you install this now on a server, you can point to it from any (HTML5) browser on any other computer without installing anything.

Of course, that's assuming it's not an April Fools joke . . .

What's a "gib?"

[guyniraxn]

A trio of Google engineers have ported id Software's gib-filled first-person shooter Quake II to browsers

Google tells me it's a castrated tomcat or crystal meth. Are these things really in Quake II?

Re:What's a "gib?"

[Trepidity]

See here.

Re:What's a "gib?"

[LordKaT]

protip: fragging used to be called getting gibbed. It's the internal name they used for Quake 1 when body parts flew all over the place.

Re:Why do I have to install something for a browse

[am 2k]

Uh, those are the instructions for running the server. You don't need any plugin for the web browser.

I guess they don't want to handle the bandwidth required for letting thousands play Quake 2 over their link (legal questions aside).

I too wish that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I played the original Quake on a 486/66 DX2. It ran at about 2 fps. I went back to playing Duke Nukem 3D and never looked back.

I too wish that I could play Duke Nukem forever.

No Flash and no Java

[trifish]

I don't know why some knee-jerks tagged this article as "Java". It's not running on Java. It uses JavaScript. It doesn't use Flash either. It's pure browser code.

Also read this part of the developers' blog post:

What this means for the Web

For years, people have assumed the browser was a poor platform for this kind of thing, and that you'd need something like Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, or native code. While it is true that you should not expect the browser to rival triple-A titles like Far Cry or Call of Duty in the browser, there is no reason why lots of casual games that used to be implemented in Flash, or are now implemented in Objective-C on the iPhone/iPad can't be done using similar techniques we've used.

In other words, goodbye Flash and Java applets. And die already.

Re:No Flash and no Java

[RAMMS EIN]

``In other words, goodbye Flash and Java applets. And die already.''

Personally, I'd much rather have had a good, efficient, open-source plugin for interactive multimedia, based on open standards.

Yes, it's nice that we can emulate that with existing web standards, but, really, why has nobody actually built a good platform specifically tailored for the things we're now using JavaScript, HTML, and HTTP for? Java was close, but too bulky. Flash was great, but proprietary. AJAX is open, but horrible from a technical point of view. Silverlight, I don't know about the technology, but it's basically Microsoft's also-ran. What else have we got, and why is it that no project seems to have gotten it right _and_ taken off, whereas so many things that have taken off haven't gotten it right?

Re:No Flash and no Java

[Anonymous Coward]

It's compiled from Java source using a toolchain written in Java probably using a Java IDE (Eclipse).

Sure it's not running on the jvm but Java is involved heavily in this.

Re:No Flash and no Java

[ChunderDownunder]

What part of the linked articles mentioning Google Web Toolkit did you miss?

GWT translates source code in Java to html and js. In this case Jake2 is written in Java, and has been massaged into GWT friendly code.

Hence the 'Java' tag.

Re:No Flash and no Java

[Anonymous Coward]

It will happen in the year of Linux Desktop.

Re:No Flash and no Java

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of the linked articles mentioning Google Web Toolkit did you miss?

Umm, I didn't miss any of that parts, kneejerk?

The original game was written in C++ and then ported to Java. This was ported from Java to JavaScript. So why not tag the article C++ as well?

Apps in a browser

[Yuioup]

And this, my friends, is why something like the iPad is going to take off ... big time.

Google is really pushing this "browser as a platform" concept to the limit. Now imagine a "GooglePad" or a "ChomePad" or something which does nothing but browse the web. You click on a link and within seconds you're gaming at 60fps. Control-scheme aside, I think this concept will be succesful.

MMORPG in a browser, anyone?

Y

HOWTO for Mandriva 2010

[hduff]

I hate how people who should know better assume that everybody runs the same Linux distro that they do and fail to write HOWTO instructions intended for a wide audience in a generic manner.

At http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2010/04/quake2-in-browser-in-mandriva-2010.html there are Mandriva-ized abbreviated instructions which are useful if you use Mandriva (or a Mandriva derivative) and want to try this out as well.

But I do have an error and Quake2 won't display (I get an Aw, Snap! in Chrome), so any feedback will be appreciated.

But can it run Linux?

[Lemming Mark]

Has anyone invoked this meme yet? I don't see it. It's relevant in this case because we really are seeing stuff that used to be native code done in the browser. If there's not a C->Javascript translator already then soon there will be. Google's native client can run compiled code. It's starting to look like we can expect a Linux kernel running in a web browser in the next few years. Not obviously that useful but would be cool and you can bet that people will find things to use it for ...

Better Idea.

[crhylove]

I like a good fps as much as the next guy. I really do, I'm an Urban Terror junkie. It's quake 3 tech, but very similar gameplay. However, it seems like we could have better uses for this technology:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1588910&cid=31546834&art_pos=5&art_pos=5

This is pure FUD.

[JackAxe]

Flash 10 noticeably improved the performance on my old G4 DP 1.25. What you're saying honestly reads more like FUD, as it doesn't add up. Prior to my Intel MacBook Pros, I had Titanium 1Ghz Powerbooks and they ran Flash content -- like games - well enough for the most part.

Here, try a few HTML 5 examples, they runs MUCH slower on a Mac than the same type of demos done in Flash;
http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/

My G4 Gets about 27 fps on all "Flash" examples, including 500 particles with shadows. With HTML 5, it averages about 12 fps 'without' shadows and about 4fps with shadows. The Flash examples are about 2 - 7x faster on average with my "PPC" running Flash Player 10. My UniBody 17" averages about 100 fps faster on all examples for reference.

With "heavy" HTML 5 content -- the link below -- on my MBpro unibody 17" in Safari and Firefox, the browser becomes almost unresponsive and the animation is very choppy. With the same type of content in Flash, my browser responds without hesitation and the animation is smooth;
Flash: http://mrdoob.com/46/Depth_of_Field_Test_07
HTML 5: http://mrdoob.com/97/Depth_of_Field_HTML5

I won't attempt this HTML 5 example on my G4 as it gives newer Mac a heavy work out.

What you're saying is more inline with what Jobs wants the world to believe instead of what's actually a reality. Please, stop regurgitating his talking points. He's not spreading FUD about Flash because it's the right thing for us as consumers, but because it stands to benefit his closed off platforms if consumers are OK with using iTunes/Quicktime as a gateway to all entertainment instead of a popular alternative like Flash, or any plug-in for that matter.

Re:This is pure FUD.

[samriel]

The trouble is you're running a G4. I have a C2D mac mini (GMA 950 graphics, no less) and I get ~30 fps even on all of those examples (except for SVG, because SVG sucks.) You're surprised that a new technology runs badly on a computer that's somewhere between four and seven years old? I'm sorry if your computer doesn't do HTML5 as well as a newer computer does, but that doesn't make it a pile of crap all around. We shouldn't be locked into proprietary Flash, Silverlight, or anything just because a four-generation-old Mac can't run the new, promising stuff.

Re:This is pure FUD.

[JackAxe]

The trouble is that instead of "reading" my post, you skimmed it and you missed something that throws your entire response out the door. I mentioned more than once that I own a Unibody MacBook Pro 17". I also mentioned that it gets about 100 fps faster on average with Flash vs the other examples.

And just for reference, there's also an Aluminum MacBook Pro 17" here and a PC( i7 920 + GTX 275) in my household.

Don't patronize me. You're the one that can't bother to read all of what was written. Also, you're the one that makes reference to a "pile of crap all around" and HTML 5, that comes from your thoughts buddy, not mine. I only pointed out that what GreatDrok stated doesn't add up with the realty of things and provided links to show that HTML 5 will not run better than Flash on a G4.

Once again, I was responding to another post and you didn't read the fact that I'm on a Unibody MBPro 17".

Anyways, plug-ins like Flash already deliver "MORE" now and it runs better on older and newer Macs. Your so-called new and promising stuff(FLUFF) is nothing more than a BIG step back for the majority. And this might come as a surprise, but plug-ins are optional.

Standard Benchmark ?

[eulernet]

So now, we can use Quake to benchmark browsers, instead of Acid2 or some Javascript libraries. Yay !

Re:Standard Benchmark ?

[Dekonega]

Behold! The ultimate browser test between Safari(WebKit nightly build) and Chrome (Chromium)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZR_m8pBYcU

Seems pretty iffy.

[argent]

Looking at their web page, you can't run it in a browser from the web, or by downloading it. You have to download it and build it, and people are reporting all kinds of problems getting it to work.

What's actually going on behind the curtain?

Good bye Windows Advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the advantages Windows always has had over, say, Unix and MacOS, is that it ran all the good games. Hard core gamers stick with Windows (or a dual boot MacBook or something) because it's the only platform that has the good games. But slowly, slowly big applications (Microsoft Office! Microsoft Encarta! Microsoft Trips and Streets!) are going into the cloud (Google docs, wikipedia, pick a map site) or becoming apps. Except the good games. And they rarely get ported to MacOS because the return on investment isn't there.

Until now this was incomprehensible.

Steam is running on both MacOS and Windows. Building rendering engines FOR YOUR BROWSER (although not yet practical, it is only a measure of when) means that one of the last great hold downs of Windows is on the verge of becoming a commodity by running in a god-damn browser!

Browser mania

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! Now we can do what we could do 10 years ago, but slower. All that matters is that it's in the browser right?

Still waiting for Duke Nukem Forever

[cbraescu1]

I'm still waiting to run Duke Nukem Forever in my browser, you insensitive clod!

AWESOME!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It can play a game from 1997!!!

That's amazing!!! I'm completely sold now on HTML5. I can't wait to play other really old games.

And nexuiz?

[Tei]

There are rumours of Nexuiz in Google Chrome OS, but Nexuiz is not Quake2, is a very high intensive opengl app, so It will need a rather good graphic card to run.

Where are flash games made?

[Tei]

If flash games are made on the Flash studio, then I don't think flash will go away easyly. Theres a lot of expertise already on flash. But if people is using platforms like Flex, maybe, and only maybe, is easy for these people to move to different stuff that is not that different. Since Flash run in actionscript and actionscript is Javascript, then maybe, and only maybe, these people would see as "easy" to switch, or test the other platform.
Who knows?

Anyway I doubt WebGL is part of any standard that will be widely available, more widelly availbale than the unstandard that is flash.

Re:Why do I have to install something for a browse

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol you boast you can make a browser plugin that would run more efficiently than this 'crap', yet you cannot even understand a simple synopsis of a simple article? Unless your programming skills are lightyears beyond your simple logic and reading skills, I think you are over estimating your own abilities. Love the capital Z in your user name too, thats pretty bad ass.

Hope this absolutely ignorant comment of yours haunts your rich slashdot career Mr BitZtream!

Wireframe rendering in Open GL ???

[RockDoctor]

I see the word "wireframe" ... and my memory lurches back to the two different versions ("wireframe" and "solid") of the old "Elite" for PCs. Now there's a piece of gaming history to aim for!
Mining lasers fore and aft, fuel scoops at the ready, and here come the Fer-de-Lances!

duke nukem

[zealotbleeds]

Isn't this Duke Nukem Forever's new engine? /s

Mod Up

[bmsleight]

No mod point. Pyjamas is wonderful.

I hope

[ignavus]

I hope someone is working on a Javascript port of the Linux kernel. I would love to know that Linux can run in my browser.

Then we go recursive: Linux runs in a browser, which runs in Linux, which runs in a browser, which runs in Linux ... and it would be Linux and browsers all the way down.

Re:I hope

[Dekonega]

Yo dawg! We heard you like linux and browsers. So we put linux inside your browser so that you can browse linux while on linux browser...

Yo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo DAWG i herd you like to game 3D so i put a 3DE GAME in yo BROWSETR so you can game WHILE you browse

Browser in browser?

[teko_teko]

Firefox already does this, just open in your address bar: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul