Doom Ported To the Web

kripkenstein writes "Ever since Id Software released the Doom source code under the GPL, it's been ported to platform after platform. Now, you can play Doom compiled to JavaScript on the web, using standard web technologies like Canvas and without any plugins. If your browser has trouble running it, here's a screencast." The translation was accomplished using Emscripten, a Javascript backend for LLVM. As per the GPL, full source code is available. Pretty neat.

Comments

Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of a 40MHz 486 and 8MiB of EDO RAM, we now require at least a 2,5GHz dual core with 1GiB of DDR3 SDRAM to accomplish the same thing on a web page.

Re:Not as cool as GWT Quake

[kripkenstein]

While this is impressive, it has been done before (and better): GWT Quake

I think that Quake demo is awesome! I'd just like to mention though that this Doom demo is very different from a technical standpoint, and I think both are interesting:

• The Quake demo compiled Java to JavaScript using GWT, the Doom demo compiles C through LLVM into JavaScript using Emscripten.
• The Quake demo uses WebGL to render, the Doom demo translates a 100% software renderer. It's much more challenging to get good performance with a software renderer in JS, especially given that the original renderer was heavily optimized for the CPUs of the day (for example, it uses fixed-point math).
• The Quake demo was a major effort, with rewriting and fixing. The Doom demo is a straightforward port, no new code (only a few tiny tweaks), took only a week to do. (Btw, speaking of the timetable, sorry for the sound quality - I just spent a few hours on that part, and I had never used the Audio Data API before.)