Google Gets Quake II Running In HTML5, Just For Fun

Very cool. [Link]

Here's how Google engineers did this in their spare time.

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. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!

That's kind of a big deal, especially to those of you who may be picking up an HTML5 supporting iPad this weekend. (No, don't expect to play Quake II in the iPad version of Safari just yet. But someday?)

Look ma, no plugin! [Google Web Toolkit Blog]