The quake2-gwt-port was released yesterday April the 1st and like many I was dubious as to its reality due to it almost being something too good to be true, however after three hours of pain-staking building I managed to finally get it working. Due to the difficulties I encountered getting it working both under Debian with the 2.6.26-2-686 kernel and those simple problems found when doing the same within OSX, I have documented my findings here to help others in their quest at deciphering googles (at the moment) poor documentation on getting this to work!

Disclaimer

The information contained within this article is a journalised version of the notes I made while I went through the process of installing quake2-gwt-port, they have been published here for informal purposes only and you follow them at your own risk. I can not be held liable if your following the below in any way breaks your computer, just because it didn’t break mine, doesn’t mean it wont break yours. In other words getting this to work on your system can only really be done if you know what you are doing.

Compiling quake2-gwt-port under Debian

The first problem I ran into when attempting this under debian on my test server was the fact that java was not previously installed so running the following command quickly sorted that out, however it did take a few hours of searching and downloading 100MB+ files from the official JAVA website before I noticed that the second post on the google code page gave the answer.

apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Once java has been installed you need to install vorbis-tools and lame as these packages contain dependences that enable audio within the port, however while vorbis-tools will install through apt-get with no problems, the same can unfortunately not be said for lame. To get apt-get to install lame I had to update my /etc/apt/sources.list file with an additional source as documented within the debian wiki here and then run the following commands to update apt-get cache and install lame and vorbis-tools.

apt-get update
apt-get install lame
apt-get install vorbis-tools

As a side-effect of the aforementioned additional source added to the apt-get sources list, apt-get kicks up the following fuss when you update it following the changes to /etc/apt/sources.list:

W: GPG error: http://www.debian-multimedia.org lenny Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

I would ignore these, and simply remove the additional source from /etc/apt/sources.list once lame has been installed as we know it’s something we have done to cause the error, and its not stopped anything from working (yet, as far as I know).

Finally so that you can download the source from google code, you should also install mercurial, this can be done within debian and many other Linux distributions through the following apt-get command as documented here.

apt-get install mercurial

For some reason on my version of debian the shell variable JAVA_HOME was not set up by the installation of Java (openjdk-6-jdk), therefore I had to crack open nano and edit /etc/profile to include the following just before the line that reads unmask 022:

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk"
export JAVA_HOME

If JAVA_HOME is not set then the compile process of Quake II will fail and you would have waisted 12 minutes waiting for the command line to tell you that.

Once you have followed the aforementioned you should now have the following required packages installed mercurial, openjdk-6-jdk, lame and vorbis-tools. Your now ready to download and build Quake II for debian using the following simple steps:

1. Load up your shell and cd into your home directory or other such workspace where your comfortable and run the following command to get a fresh copy of the code from google code:
   hg clone https://quake2-gwt-port.googlecode.com/hg/ quake2-gwt-port
2. cd into the newly formed quake2-gwt-port directory
3. Run ./build-dedicated-server this will build the tools and the client and server code.
4. Next Run ./install-resources which will download, unpack, and convert the original Quake II demo resources, for reasons of copyright respect these have to be downloaded from their source and cant be packaged on google code.
5. Due to a glitch in the way the above two commands install the code, you then have to copy the created gwtquake from maven-build/server/target/gwtquake/war/gwtquake to /war/gwtquake using the following command: cp -r maven-build/server/target/gwtquake/war/gwtquake war/qwtquake
6. Everything is now ready to run using the command ./run-dedicated-server [port]

On my debian set-up I encountered several [WARNING] notices during the resource install but those where mostly related to character encodings and did not halt or impair the install. As I installed this on my server I have not been able to test it works within a browser due to a lack of time, however the install under osx is a much simpler affair.

Compiling quake2-gwt-port under OSX

Please Note: you must have OSX developer tools installed before you can compile anything.

As OSX does not come with vorbis-tools or lame installed you have to grab them yourself, fortunately with the fact that OSX is basically Linux with a pretty user interface doing so is very easy. To install the additional components required for the compiling of quake2-gwt-port under OSX I would recommend installing homebrew,over the much bloated MacPorts as given within the google code instructions. Installing homebrew is a very simple task indeed, first read through the online install instructions so you know what your doing then simply run the following two lines of commands:

sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local
curl -Lsf http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tarball/master | tar xvz -C/usr/local --strip 1

Once that has completed installing the required items for compiling the quake2-gwt-port is as simple as running the following lines of commands within OSX terminal:

brew install vorbis-tools
brew install lame
brew install mercurial

Once that is done you can continue with the instructions 1 to 6 above under the debian install guide.

Playing quake2-gwt-port under OSX

Hopefully the install went smoothly and you are now ready to play with your new toy, unfortunately just sending any old browser to http://localhost:8080/GwtQuake.html wont work as almost all modern day browsers are not compatible with HTML5, or if they are its only half an implementation due to the protocols still being on the drawing board. Two browsers that are compatible with the quake2-gwt-port are Google’s own Chromium browser and Webkit (click on links for download pages), which I presume to be the developers version of Safari due to its icon but I may be mistaken.

To get Webkit to play the game you first have to run the following command in terminal to enable webGL to be utilised by HTML5:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled -bool YES

To get Chromium to play the game you have to first pass it a set of variables as you start it up, to do this, in your terminal cd to the applications folder where you have saved Chromium and run the following command to load Chromium with WebGL enabled:

./Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --enable-webgl --no-sandbox

Review of Game-play in Chromium and Webkit

At the moment I am unable to get the game to run in Chromium with sound, however with Webkit while audio played amazingly well as did single player, when I set it up to run the demo it crashed every time. The performance in Webkit was also noticeably better than in Chromium, with Webkit hitting 40fps at one point while Chromium lagged behind with an average of just 10fps! I have included below some screen shots of each browser playing the game and shall post updates when I get the version installed on my server working multi-player with some systems in my house.

If you have attempted getting this to work, like the article or have something to say, please add your comment below; I always try to respond to all comments posted here.

This illustration by Bill Mudron has been floating about the intertubes for a while now, i think that it’s pretty cool.

At the current build sound isn’t entirely functional with a little way to go before the bugs are kicked out and there are a few graphic based problems and bugs to be worked on as well as the addition of multiplayer before this can be called a finished Quake DS port.

Now if only someone could port Unreal Tourniment to a portable platform and I would be happy.

Source: Drunken Coders Via MaxConsole

(To skip the long story and get to the point go to the bottom)

FOG Games which stood for Free Online Games was the very first website I managed that became a sucess (you could say photogabble is my seccond). It was quite obviousley a free games website and back in 2000 and earlier there were very few websites that hosted a load of javascript, DHTML and java games so as soon as mine was found out it became an instant hit. I used to bounce around the net on various different free hosts and I never cleaned up after myself so there became various versions of the site fossilised there for all time and forgotten by me. To keep my visitors linked to the latest version on the latest host I had one or two fixed domain names which were of course obtained from free sources such as da.ru amongst others, supprisingly I never actually paid for anything to do with my website! I learnt to code html and css in 1999 and went through several websites before settling on foggames, as soon as I noticed I was achieving 1000 visitors a week with over 50 page views per visitor I knew I had a good thing going. Just thinking about it I must have only just started seccondry school

FOG Games evolved into FO Games (to remove the typo in the original name) in 2001 but I have yet to find any existing versions of that site… This is truely an amazing find for me, because I can see that even then 7 fucking years ago I was pretty damn good at what I was doing! From then on FOGames was achieving in its hay-day almost 4000 visitors a week but then either during the summer of 2002 or 2003 the traffic took a nose dive as other websites popped up with custom flash games combined with kids being off school. Due to most of the traffic originating from schools because my website was one of the few that wasn’t actually blocked my website became a dried up desert and because I couldn’t really understand where all the visitors had gone I gave up on FOGames. To put this in perspective as to what I have now, photogabble regularly gets on average between 150 and 200 visits a day (by 3000 visitors a month) so you can see how much better FOGames was doing in contrast. Being influenced into anime and furry art styles by kina-ink I bought anime-planet.co.uk a domain I let go a few months ago, and which I wish I hadn’t because one of those spam mongerers has nabbed it FOGames was quietly shut down and all traffic forwarded to anime-planet and my new hosting I paid for with my first job. After then my dad bought me the photogabble domain a year before I got into Coventry university and I ran a very, very old apple power pc (built in 1982 dual 20Mhz w00) as a server which the first version of photogabble ran on, wordpress and pretty much anything else would run shit show on it so I developed my own blogging software that ran incredibly fast on the server – which was doing well for its age running apache and mysql services on 20Mhz!

(End long story, begin point to post)

Well I have found an example of FOG Games, one of my earlier websites, it would be amazing if I could find my very first hand coded html website but I guess that shall just remain a dream. It’s hosted by fortunecity a horrible host at the time (and a worse one now) but fortunatly they don’t delete old accounts so most my stuff is there abeit horribly scarred by google adverts and other shit fortunecities decided to shove on it

You can see the website here, and it’s actually taken me a lot longer than normal to write this post because I have been playing the games on there! It’s still got its charm lol. I am now in the process of ripping my website off their servers and stripping out all the extra crap fortunecities added it shall be then hosted for prosperity here on photogabble for all to see

Stay tuned!

Because I use xp64 on my pc a lot of the good old dos games I used to play wont run, even under dosbox – which is a problem from windows 2k onwards im afraid. One of my favourite games of all time UFO Enemy unknown will install from cd but the actuall game wont run on my pc. Now if i were to admit to being a hard core computer user, I could boot up from dos on a floppy disk (yes ancient technology I know but it works!) mount the cd rom and play the game – but thats a lot of hard work just for one game. I decided to google it, see if anyone had fixed the problems I had come accross, since I used to play it loads under windows 98 and when we upgraded to XP none of my old dos games would run, let alone on my even newer xp64 box. This is where I stumbled into the world of abandonware. After a few hours of searching I had found UFO Enemy Unknown and decided to download it as the website said it supported windows xp. Im not sure of the legality of downloading it but as its abandonware and as I already bought the cd years ago – and still have that cd in my posesion – I dont see it being a problem.

The file downloaded was pretty much the game files so all I had to do was copy them accross to where I wanted to run the game from… D:\My Applications\Dos Games\UFO\ and it worked. It just worked, sound and everything (because im doing this from memory i cant remember if it just worked natively under x64's 32bit emulation, or if I had to use dos box. But thats not important, the important thing is it worked).

Well seeing as todays modern PC games – with a few exceptions: doom III, UT2k4 – are focused totally on graphics and less on game-play I decided to go on the hunt for some free ones online (not the abandon-ware ones mind you, the open-source free ones). My first port of call is sourceforge and I have found a huge list of games that look to promise some good game play. As I am not at home atm I am unable to provide a first person review of each game, so for now this shall have to provide as a preview and when I get home tonight I shall download the ones listed here and play them so as to write a comprehensive review on them.

Automanic

From the description this sounds like it could be a fun game to play. I used to spend countless hours playing twisted metal in turns with friends and my sisters – so it could be classed as a good favorite of mine. It is written in C++ and python and although as far as I can tell they have only ported it to Linux because of the languages used to write it, it shouldn't be too difficult to port to other frameworks – if they don't have an x86 windows port I might try to compile it with native x64 support. The graphics aren't all that good it seems, but then again it was always the game play in twisted metal that kept me playing for hours on end.

Irrlicht Engine

Not a game on its own but the Irrlicht Engine really does look like something good. If you go to the engines website you can find a varied list of games that have been built using the engines base. I have included this here in the list because I shall be checking out some of the games that have been made using it and writing an article on that. Also I am bored of the useless collection of windows screen savers that come with xp, so I may use this engine to create some pretty ones all depends on how quick it is

UFO2000

This one goes back to the beginning of this article my love of UFO Enemy Unknown and looks to be one of the first I shall download and try tonight. Im not too sure how well developed this is as it is still in beta. But from the screenshots it does look to be a pretty good representation of the UFO games, and the developers say that it is able to import the image maps from the actual game to provide an even better representation. Even though I am likely to play UFO Enemy Unknown over this, it does look to be an interesting game and so I shall give it a go and let you know what I think.

EDuke32

Next to UFO Enemy Unknown on my list of games I loved would be Duke Nukem 3D. I haven't been able to find this in recent years, although ages ago I managed to find a demo download which was basically the full first level. The last time I properly played this was on an N64 and since then I have only been able to find and play demo versions for the pc. Alas since getting an x64 pc I haven't been able to find a version of Duke Nukem that will run – however if this one doesn't run the source is available and so I may be able to port it to native x64 architecture – although I don't know too much about such things. In the past I have simply pressed compile and ran the executable it produced. The developers describe this as A cross-platform, OpenGL-rendered Duke Nukem 3D port which provides many new features for mod authors. So if it wont run under native 32-bit emulation I should be able to compile it for native x64. If this works I will be one happy bunny as I have tried numerous times this year to get a version of Duke Nukem working.

Scorched 3D

Summarized Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth. Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across the internet or LAN. I never played Scorched Earth, never even heard of the game to be honest, what attracted me to this one is the multiplayer function. Many a late night has been burnt up with me and Andrew playing Worms Armageddon and AOE II over the network, and if this provides some good game play then it may be added to our list of multi-player games. The problem with many PC games nowadays, is the fact that you need a fkn cd to play the game, so what if you want to play the game multiplayer on your computers on your network? You can't, unless you crack the cd! I don't know about you but this sounds like the game companies are fueling piracy… all the way though the UT series up-to UT2k3 you could install the game on any PC you owned and not need the cd when I found that UT2k3 wouldn't run without the cd the first thing I did was hunt for a crack! Fortunately the game makers discovered the dismay this caused the UT community and almost immediately released a no-cd patch for the game. Fortunately you don't get this problem with open-source :p

Secret Maryo Chronicles

Described as a Classic Mario game like Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers with an advanced Leveleditor and new Graphics based on SDL, written in C++. Im really interested in the level editor as I always liked the concept of being able to make your own maps for a game. I really liked the Mario Games on the NES and Super NES so being able to play similar on the PC and to be able to edit my own maps for playing is a really cool idea. The graphics look rather good, albeit in a cartoon style. But I'm all about the game play and if they have managed to make that even half of what the original was like then this should turn out to be a new favorite. Says it runs under linux and windows so we shall see if it runs on my x64 box if it does this looks from the screenshots to be a game I may play often.

Cytadela (the Citadel)

From the description it sounds like this is a port of an old doom clone for Amiga. They say that it is OS portable, so I hope they have a x86 version for me to run under emulation. I don't know too much about this as the description was rather brief so all I can comment on is the screenshot that I have got hold of. From the screenshot this looks like a good old 3D FPS and if its based on doom then I'm interested to see what the game-play is like – seeing as I really liked the doom series right up to doom III (which I am having problems getting to run on x64). I shall be able to shed some light on this one and let you know wether its good or not, once I download and play it at home.

As you can see from the tiny selection I have posted above, the world of free open source games is pretty varied and of reasonable quality. Some of these projects have as many active developers as closed-source games and the quality of some can match if not surpass that of retail versions. I chose to ignore any games listed on sourceforge that didn't have screenshots in the main listing when I was browsing. However I am sure I must have missed a few good ones, mainly because Azerius didn't have a screenshot in the browse list either and although I really don't like that torrent program (Im a utorrent guy) it is of good quality.

I shall attempt to get some of the aforementioned games working tonight and get back here with an article explaining a) how i got them to work and b) reviewing how they play. 

lv33 JNQGOS
lv34 KNRHOT
lv35 LNSIOU
lv36 MNTJOV
lv37 NNUKOW
lv38 ONVLOX
lv39 PNWMOV
lv40 GONDOQ
lv41 HOOEOR
lv42 IOPFOS
lv43 JOQGOT
lv44 KORHOU
lv45 LOSIOV
lv46 MOTJOW
lv47 NOUKOX
lv48 OOVLOY
lv49 POWMOZ
lv50 GPNDOR
lv51 HPOEOS
lv52 IPPFOT
lv53 JPQGOU
lv54 KPRHOV

So yeah enjoy, and don’t if you do begin to play it, forget about going to sleep…