Quake Live Now Available To Linux Gamers

[Dragonlord]

If they create an OpenGL ES-like spec, then it will push your hardware. It will have support for shaders and everything.

The specs maybe yes but not the browser. To use hardware to the max you need some heavy CPU processing. JS is not going to provide that. Furthermore you need quite some media data around too. Sending 1GB of game data over the wire each time you want to play? That's ouch. You could cache it but then again you need an extra plugin which brings us back to the question why bother in the first place.

[Remco]

Khronos is preparing the WebGL standard for release during early 2010. It seems they are planning to make it usable from straight Javascript, which opens up some interesting possibilities.

Yep, the Khronos press release says the same:

The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL? ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards.

I agree with grantek from a few days ago that Quake Live might be a good thing, since it creates a use case for 3D on the web. I don't think it would be too hard to port the Quake 3 engine to WebGL, since OpenGL and OpenGL ES are a lot alike. The translation from C to Js would be the major work. So maybe, by next year, we'll be playing Quake Live in a native <canvas> element in Arora 1.0 on an ARM netbook running FreeBSD.

[BlackStar]

Khronos is preparing the WebGL standard for release during early 2010. It seems they are planning to make it usable from straight Javascript, which opens up some interesting possibilities.

[Remco]

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.

If they create an OpenGL ES-like spec, then it will push your hardware. It will have support for shaders and everything.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[RagingDragon]

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

Ah. That makes more sense.

[Kano]

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