Quake Live Now Available To Linux Gamers

[sloggerKhan]

urgh - do you remember the web 10 years ago!? The Netscape Plugin architecture is a well-known standard and is used by pretty much everything except IE, there's no reason to discriminate between browsers beyond whether they implement it. For support reasons, it'd be much nicer to throw up a message saying "Oh noes, we can't tell what browser you're using. If you have any problems, we recommend trying with Firefox".

The browser whitelist may be a punkbuster thing though, I wouldn't put it past them to checksum various known binaries.

I tried it. Crashed during the calibration match. And honestly, it seemed pretty boring after having played nexuiz for a while.

And the default of autoswitching weapons EVERY time you pass a weapon spawn is really irritating.

[tuke81]

I tried it. Crashed during the calibration match. And honestly, it seemed pretty boring after having played nexuiz for a while.

And the default of autoswitching weapons EVERY time you pass a weapon spawn is really irritating.

Thats easily changed with cvar: cg_autoswitch 0
Create file autoexec.cfg in your home base folder and this line in it:

nano ~/.quakelive/quakelive/home/baseq3/autoexec.cfg
seta cg_autoswitch 0

Same default was in original quake3arena... Oh and here you can see all quakelive cvars:

http://www.holysh1t.net/quake-live-commands-list/

[Joe Sixpack]

I tried it. Crashed during the calibration match. And honestly, it seemed pretty boring after having played nexuiz for a while.

And the default of autoswitching weapons EVERY time you pass a weapon spawn is really irritating.

Which is precisely why I uninstalled OpenArena after I gave Nexuiz a try. This is even more so true since they added a few Quake 3 Arena maps to Nexuiz 2.5. I still respect OpenArena though, it's just not for me.

(now back on topic...)

Quake Live sounds very promising. I watched the video on the website, but I didn't try to play it (I'm not big on trying major projects when they're still in beta).

[RagingDragon]

Look into

~/.quakelive/quakelive/home/baseq3/

there are binary libs (for 32 and 64 bit). Does not look like java.

Probably a JNI wrapper using the original Quake 3 C/C++ libraries.

[Kano]

You do not need Java installed at all, because a native browser plugin uses those libs.

[RagingDragon]

You do not need Java installed at all, because a native browser plugin uses those libs.

Ah. That makes more sense.

[Yfrwlf]

Everyone who plays Quake Live apparently wants something that is 10 years old.

What I want is a real Quake Live. One that is really webbased. That's how Quake Live was presented. That's what piqued my interest, since that's a major technological advancement. Reality is disappointing. It's just Quake 3 Arena with a few gameplay improvements.

Now, the game is obviously much fun to play. Q3A was a great game, so Quake Live, which is a patched up Q3A, can't be worse.

It's not that I don't like the game, it's that I hate the marketing, and the technical gimmick that insults real 3D web efforts, and adds a whole new host of compatibility problems, because not only do you depend on a specific operating system, you also depend on a specific browser.

Mostly agreed with you, the way it comes off makes you think it's an actual web standards-based game. It seems silly to me too, not much different than downloading and running a client, but the way I see it they are basically using the browser plugin system, which is not standardized unfortunately (and should be), for package management. So instead of downloading a file and clicking on it blahblahblah, you may click a few less times to install a "plugin" instead?

In any case, I too am real excited about the new 3D web standards coming and it would be really neat to see a game using them instead of just being a typical game that is not only platform specific but also browser specific and is simply lightly hooked into those browsers. I don't know how difficult it would be right now to try to make a 3D game with the possibly-still-not-solidified specifications of the two 3D standards, since I don't know how you'd deal with things like additional 3D engine features, but it would certainly be neat.

[Dragonlord]

Real 3D game with web standards = impossible. The system is not made for that. Besides this browser-game-plugin crap is... well... crap. Why wasting processing power on a browser and plugin to run a game instead of running an optimized single client? I really see no benefit out of this at all.

[djack]

I wouldn't ever say impossible, just unlikely.
If we ever get a decent successor to VRML, things should be doable. Probably not fast paced FPSs and certainly not anything that can be seen as cutting edge. Just like there are real, browser based 2D games right now.

[Dragonlord]

With real 3D games I meant stuff that pushes the hardware like I do. That stuff is too advanced. NDS type graphics though would be possible and feasible if a sane 3D specification would exist.