Google encourages its engineers to 20 percent of their time working on projects that aren't necessarily in their job descriptions. The corporate philosophy that spawned Google products like including Gmail and Google News has perhaps had its greatest achievement yet: an HTML5 port of Quake II.
This first person shooter has been around for over 12 years and has been ported onto a wide swath of hardware platforms, but it's latest incarnation shows off much of the potential for HTML5.
While we've seen HTML5 in action rendering video , it can crunch through some relatively sophisticated graphics. And gameplay is reportedly no slouch, either -- developer Ray Cromwell reports getting up to 60 fps on Linux.
Ready to get Quake II running for yourself? It helps to have a bit of experience mucking about with the command line. To start, you'll need the Chromium browser to run Quake II and Mercurial to check out the code from Google. If you're on Windows, you'll need a Linux-like environment such as Cygwin , and on a Mac you'll need MacPorts . To do the actual installation, follow these directions, which have been tweaked from the Google Code project site for Quake II .
