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.

Found here yorityorit the above is a very interesting concept and something I may soon attempt to recreate myself. The idea of creating your own google images page not simply through coding html within the virtual domain but through physically making something untangable such as a webpage a physical object within the real world is an interesting one. The website I found this on appears to have no link to original author so I cant say wether or not my interpretation is the authors original intentions, however I did feel it was important enough to share here with you :heart:

1. Search for any name, male or female. One name only such as “Sam”, “Jess”, “Alex”, must have someone called after it.
2. Go to the page relevant to the number month you where born in. For me that’s page nine as I was born in September.
3. Choose the number picture displayed coinciding with the day your where born on. For me this is the 11th image shown.
4. *Must not be (if so go back one link):
   1. Pornographic.
   2. Non Human.

To make it more difficult you can have safe filter turned off and follow an additional fourth rule that the image must not be pornographic. Now you would think that such a simple game wouldn’t be very appealing and thus only a couple of minutes would have been wasted playing it. But to quite Dave Gorman nothing is that simple when it involves the internet and so I have wasted practically a whole day playing this silly game.

*After spending today playing the game I have added fourth and fifth rules.

Now naturally I began playing this game by entering in my own name “Simon”. And I found the following image:

This linked me to a cheesy Simon Kirke fansite which didn’t give me any reason to hang around after the seccond time the mp3 looped on the page. Any page that thinks auto playing music to me, is not worth my time. However I had a game to play and wondered where I should go from here. Then I noticed the yellow copyright tag on the image, it gave a name and I knew what I should then do. I typed Lucy into google image search and the following came up.

It would appear that female names are more likely to show images of women wearing very little, but I was lucky this time as the 11th image in was an image from Tasteful Celebs and thus I was able to continue playing, but not before having a quick look through the page for another real name to use, I thought all was lost as the comments section only gave me names such as ajay but then I saw at the bottom the name Dennis and continued to google images to check it out. By now I had come up with the hypothesis that I would find much more porn connected to female names than male names, thus the likelihood of me coming across a pornographic image and thus loosing the game increased with female names. I thought now I would see if I could make it to ten names in a row and see if my hypothesis was proven true or not, for now with current evidence it remained true as the name Dennis gave me this:

The page is the self authored biography of the self confessed pipe smoker Dennis Womack. Evidently this image is neither of a girl, or pornographic so I continued down the page in hope of another name from which to flow from. This was the first page I had come to on this journey which actually held my interest, the guy has a rather cool hobby collecting and smoking pipes is more classy that cigarettes and thus allowed (not sure if there are any health benefits but the smell of pipe tobacco doesn’t make me want to vomit like the cheap cigarette tobacco most smokers, smoke). After reading through the page a couple of times my eyes fell across the name of his wife “Syler” I had never heard of this name before but he said it was his wife’s so I took his word at face value and entered it into google hoping for clean images. I wasn’t that surprised to see that google images didn’t give me that great a choice, but at least it wasn’t porn. Unfortunately due to copyright constraints on the page and me not wanting to post a tiny thumbnail here you will have to go here to see it, I got there from an index page of articles taken from the Northwest Indiana News this gave me a host of names to choose from and as there wasn’t anything of much interest to me on that page I just grabbed the first name (“John”) and entered it into google. This brought me to the following page in Stratford-upon-Avons website and gave me the following image:

By now I had become less interested in the content provided to me and more interested in finding 10 images linked in a row, so I scanned down the page for the first name to be mentioned and found “Robert”. This brought me to Robert Bradford’s personal website and it would appear he is an Artist living in Cornwall and the image google gave me was of him and his wife Penny hanging a frame, not only was it a nice image but it gave me the seventh name for my journey.

I held back for a second before entering it into google, so far I hadn’t landed on any porn images which was nice. But this was a female name and as my hypothesis predicted I had a higher chance of coming across an image which would end the game for me then and there. I took that chance and searched, finding this:

Yes a graph! This wasn’t a picture of a girl called Penny, but a graph of her “Wealth Dynamics Profile” more of which can be seen here. It would appear upon closer inspection of the page that she is the Founder of Ecademy a website created to connect business people. I decided that as the image was so far down the page, I would only focus on the “page area” it was on, saving me from reading through the entire page to find a name, the name given was her husbands (“Thomas”) and it gave me the following image:

Thomas the tank engine, it was a dead end! There where no other names on the page, even the image itself didn’t give rise to any leads. I was stuck, could this be game over? Had I lost at the 8th hurdle? Cursing xs-stock I thought back to the inspiration for this journey, Dave’s Googlewhack adventure and thought hang on, when he got to a dead end he just turned back and followed another lead. So what was to stop me from doing that, it wasn’t in the three rules so that is exactly what I did, I turned back. My seventh GooImage was Pennys and I quickly scanned through the page for any other names than Thomas, I held high hopes as I didn’t want to have to go back all the way to five and build up from there. I didn’t have to search for long as right at the top of the page under her 50 words was the name “Hannah”. I held my breath as I searched google for it and breathed a sigh of relief as the following image popped up:

It took me to a rather nasty looking web page, not nasty as in content but the aesthetics made my eyes bleed, wasn’t surprising considering it had been designed in Microsoft FrontPage 5.0! I once again scanned the page for a name and saw it had been “designed” by a J Turner. A name being a name (first or last) I entered it into google and was happy to be faced with the following image as ninth in the chain:

The image lead me to the homepage of Turner Sports Cars. It was interesting to read and find out about a British built car I had never heard of. The image itself was of the man behind the design and building of the car, a car which was only built during the years 1949 to 1966. It was nice to read a little bit of history on such a beautiful car. To think if I hadn’t begun playing this game, I would never have seen this page. I found the next name and my tenth link in this chain at the bottom of the page, the name Russell was sat almost next to the image and without waiting any more I entered it into google and found the following:

It wasn’t a picture of a person, rather a cartoon and the page in question was about the cartoonist Dan Russell. It was also the tenth link in the chain. I have to admit that at this point I felt the game had been too easy I had got to ten in a row with only one set back, if I where to play it again I would need to make it more complex. Also my hypothesis wasn’t proven either correct or incorrect as I had mostly received male names, this could be attributed to the fact that males dominate the internet but that would be a question to be answered another day. Instead I compiled the following diagram to show my journey and thought up two more rules to be added to the game.

It was at this point I noticed something odd. I had only done 9 links. I thought I had finished and won, but I hadn’t. I still had that 10th link to find. Fortunately this didn’t cause that big of a problem, the 9th link had provided me with many names to choose from and I went once again for the first in the page (Jim). Upon a very quick google I came across this:

Not going to comment on the image, just glad it wasn’t porn. It looks like the page is from someone’s blog describing a holiday they went on. For me it was a gold mine for names. However I had to take a break, spending this many consecutive hours on google does things to you. So that is where I leave the journey for now. 10 Links, 11 images 1 dead end. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

I haven’t based my new design on any other template base as its been entirely coded from scratch. I predict that with the current degree of work I have to do the new design won’t be “live” for another week at least while I fix things, which is being made all the more difficult considering that the database for this wordpress install is extremely old dating back to the first version of wordpress! So it has collected a hell of a lot of extra baggage in that time. Unfortunately there are only three ways of fixing this that I know of. One is to start the blog again from scratch, something I am not prepared to do. While the long and tedious task of manually copying over 217 posts and more than 400 comments really is too much for me to contemplate. So I have chosen the easy route, or easier route; I am writing a PHP script to copy select bits of my wordpress database – most notably the posts, categories and comments tables as well as link tables. The script will then condition the data while its stored in an array before inserting it into my new fresh wordpress install. This new install has fixed a hell of a lot of bugs which I had been noticing in the admin of the blog, bugs which actually have no plausible answer as to why they have happened such as the feeds on the dashboard being shown in reverse date order – thus me only being able to see the oldest posts in the community No one else seems to have had that problem except for me and I believe it to be a corruption within the config table.

Other advancements I am adding to the website are a full portfolio, about me and gallery for those of you who are interested in seeing what I have created, knowing more about me and viewing the photos I so lovingly capture and publish. There will also be an opportunity to hire me if you like my work.

Lastly or at least second to last, one third of the traffic to this blog is spam requests which is stupidly annoying and is causing undue stress on my server. Some of the spam waves have been able to knock my server out for hours which is not only against the law but an inconvenience to both myself and people who visit. I have been putting into place some counter measures to reduce the effect, these should hopefully be noticeable when the new theme is booted.

Lastly I read this about Google’s Supplemental Hell and have decided to add some counter measures to that in the new theme. I recommend you read that post and see what you can do to save your blog.

Oh and before I go, I know this is an amazingly long post or the irony. However I must also note that the new theme will most likely be available in a cut down form as a wordpress theme. I don’t know if I shall release it or not that all depends on how much interest I receive…

Good night.

So yeah if you currently use my old feed links then don’t worry I set up the sexy little .htaccess file to automatically deal with old feed traffic, mostly to save me having to change anything in the website’s template except for adding the widget

Powerflakes

Seeing as I visit my top five blogs every day to check if they have new stuff, it dawned on me that I should have a feed aggregator for my home page that would show up all my favorite subscribed website’s and let me know if there is any new posts. At first I tried Google home page but the design reminded me too much of 1999 all nasty and without style. In the end after looking about I decided upon Powerflakes. It has a nice clean design and I can fit three columns on my monitor with ease so I can show all my regular blogs feeds in one page, fantastic! It is now my homepage and so everytime I open a new tab I can quickly check for any updates.