http://www.thechromesource.com/googlers-bring-quake-ii-to-the-browser/
Looks like I’ll never escape HTML, it’s chasing me!!! ;D
I had a look at the video - very slow rendering. Not that impressive really
This version is about 3 times slower than the version using LWJGL. HTML5 + JavaScript seems to become a good alternative to Flash (it will depend on the available tools for the designers too) but not to Java + OpenGL (whatever the binding).
Actually, if you render a completely empty scene you get pretty much the same frame rate. You also get pretty much the same frame rate if the scene is 50 times more demanding than Quake2.
Everything is rendered into a buffer and that buffer is copied over to another buffer which is then used by the browser’s scene graph to composite around. That’s where that big fixed hit comes from. If they manage to enable direct blitting (like applets or Flash with wmode=window [default]), it will be a lot faster.
It’s all still a bit… “look, I’ve created a guitar entirely from matchsticks!!” isn’t it.
Cas 
“Up to 60 FPS” :
Yes, it is a cool concept, but will not be of any use as long as the framerate promises to be up to acceptable, but almost certainly way below. However, this is brand new, so it could improve. Wake me up when it does.
[quote=“jojoh,post:7,topic:35101”]
me too! zzzzz…
If IE takes it, if netbooks can do it, if, if, if! I want product! Maybe in 2-3 years time we’ll all be WebGLing, but right now java’s looking better than ever for this stuff. Why didn’t sun bundle some kinda 3D??? Even software would have done - we can optimise! sigh It’s such a shame to see an empty freight train go by…
Not exactly. It’s more like: “Look, i’ve created a guitar entirely from matchsticks. But because working with matchsticks directly is so awkward, i used the GMT (Google Matchstick Toolkit) that compiles solid objects into matchstick objects”.
Does it require signing to run that WebGL stuff?
Or are we going to see 3D accelerated ads in the near future on sites like CNN?
No, because about a third of computers will simply not work. We still live in an age of broken OpenGL drivers for PCs. And Microsoft want you to use Silverlight/WPF so they’re not going to fix it any time soon.
Cas
However, this is brand new, so it could improve.
Yes, it will improve. The big idea is to accelerate the complete pipeline which in turn removes the need to copy that buffer around. Sounds sorta far fetched, but they are actually already working on it.
if netbooks can do it
Intel? No.
It already works on some smart phones though.
Thumbs up for Quake 8)
Anyone know how they made Quake Live? (www.quakelive.com)
I can remember reading something like “dont worry we arn’t going to make it out of Java…” :-\
I’ve not seen anything like it though, not Java based but only requires a quick plugin download to play in your browser or full screen.
its just the standard C quake 3 (modified) and they’ve written their own native plugin.
Thats crazy that they made their own plugin, I think someone big needs to step up and push java in games to show what can be done, then they might have used Java…
well it made no sense for them to use java, they already had a really solid and well tested game engine in C. So writing a plugin was a lot less work then porting the whole engine. The quake 3 engine already worked on Windows, Mac & Linux so really don’t see the advantage they would have gained anyway.
They could however have used the java plugin to launch and embed their C engine. However the java plugin1 was pretty horrible so was probably a better move to write their own.
Fair enough, I know about the Quake engine but nothing about web based stuff so that makes enough sense to me. lol
Sorry to refresh this old thread. I have just tested GwtQuake 2 in Firefox 4 with an Intel Core 2 & NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 and I’m very disappointed, the performances are very poor, it is between 5 and 10 times slower than Jake 2 and there are some brutal slowdowns every 20 seconds. I assume it will be worse on my old home computer (AMD Sempron 3600+ & NVIDIA 7600 GT).
WebGL is a promising solution for various kinds of applications but I won’t advise it for first person shooters.
well do note that GWTQuake 2 isn’t really an optimal use case, it was ported from C to Java, which wasn’t the most optimal thing to do in the first place and then again from there to javascript. Games relying aggressively on things like shader should be a lot faster and bottlenecked by the video card and not the language used. Also rather unfair to be making such comparisons so early on against javascript as its still early days for the JIT compilers but I would say at the rate progress is being made it won’t be long before they start catching up Java in terms of performance.
I’m not sure porting Quake 2 from C to JavaScript would have been trivial.
However, obviously you cannot do everything on shaders. If JavaScript “is” slow, the tasks done on the CPU will be slow.
[quote=“kappa,post:19,topic:35101”]
As far as I know, the current implementation of WebGL in Firefox 4 uses both a JIT compiler and an equivalent of the direct NIO buffer for JavaScript (Kenneth Bradley Russell works on this). Even JavaScript on Rhino is more than twice slower than Java on the same JVM. JavaScript is more difficult to optimize than Java (because Java is strongly typed whereas JavaScript isn’t), that’s why in my humble opinion JavaScript and Java’s performances will get closer but JavaScript will remain noticeably slower.