HTML5 + Quake2 = AWESOME!

HTML5 is still a work in progress and some browsers can’t do what others can at the moment.  List for geeks:  Comparison_of_layout_engines:  HTML5.  An example for the not so geeky:  Chrome and Safari allows HTML5 video streaming on Youtube while Firefox does not.  While this will all change in good time, a great show of HTML5′s potential has been shown.  A port of a classic game, Quake II, has been made available to play via your web browser!  Freaking awesome!!

It’s all still very beta. Depending on which browser you try(ATM only Chrome and Safari) and it’s version you may experience slow FPS, no sound and screen flickering.

To help minimize fail, before you start to follow the instructions on installing quake2-gwt-port make sure you have the following installed before hand.

• vorbis-tools
• lame
• jdk

Installing JKD before trying to run “./build-dedicated-server” is important.  I thought I had it still installed on my system, and when that failed to build I went, “DUH” and installed it.  However, it still would work.  I had to killed the cloned source directory and start over.  After that I was able to get a bit further but also ran into an issue with it looking for tools.jar in “/usr/lib64/java/../lib/tools.jar”.  As you can see it’s telling it to leave the java directory which is WRONG!  So a quick fix was to symlink the “/usr/lib64/java/lib” directory in my “/usr/lib64″ directory.

ln -s /usr/lib64/java/lib /usr/lib64/lib

After that it built fine and I was able to run the server.  YEY!!

The things I’ve noticed that didn’t work or were buggy:

• Changes settings in the default.cfg located in “quake2-gwt-port/war/baseq2″ does not appear to change anything.  Adding a autoexec.cfg also did nothing
• Gamma was too low to play
• Sound was a bit off and most of the time the effect happening would have no sound or a delayed sound.  I was receiving a lot of errors from chrome about it unable to set the hw params.  Here is what they looked like for me:  http://pastebin.com/aPBWYT4K
• Errors in the console saying that it couldn’t load a file.  It would reference a number like:  ”#144″ 4 or 5 times but the number wasn’t always the same.  I noticed it changed if i closed chrome and reopened to restart the game.
• Graphic glitches would show the green/black polygon shapes only for a moment before fully loading

GAMMA FIX

Create a file, IE: quake2-gwt.sh.  Cut and paste the following into that file and make it executable

#!/bin/sh
xgamma -gamma 1.8
/opt/google/chrome/chrome --enable-webgl --no-sandbox
xgamma -gamma 1

Thats it!  Please note that this only works if no other chrome sessions exist.  If the gamma is too high, lower it to 1.6 or 1.4 until it’s good enough for you.

If you find out any way to solve the sound issues in chrome, let me know or be sure to mention it on the project page!  http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/

Happy Quaking!