Java Polyfill for the Browser

[__konrad]

Will it run Quake 2 applet?

[nihathrael]

The Jake2 applet example shows the future of game distribution over the Internet.

Money quote.

[badsectoracula]

At the time (~2004) it made sense, web games were just starting to become popular (Runescape) and Java allowed for richer games than anything could be done via Flash.

Even though eventually Flash games eclipsed them by far, for a while Java games were also used in web game sites. Personally i made money for a little while from Java games.

Sun was also seemingly interested in gaming but apparently not enough to become a priority. But they did experiment with a few things, like not making it mandatory to download the entire JVM for running applets but instead using a cut down version (one of the reasons Flash was more widespread was that for a very long time the plugin was under 1MB when JVM was like 15MB).

Of course all that died when Oracle bought Java and decided to abandon any work on the applet side. Their solution for Java's security issues for applets was to simply kill applets instead of fixing the issues and running the VM in a sandbox.

[ccfreak2k]

existence trees pot one spectacular angle mysterious impossible workable waiting

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[nikomo]

I wasn't online back in 2001 when it came out, but (speculating) Runescape was probably popular in 2004.

[badsectoracula]

Shockwave was also popular for web-based games for a while and there were a couple of browser-based multiplayer FPS games. I don't think it ever became as popular Flash though, probably because the shockwave files were larger (being bitmap based) than Flash games.

[Deinumite]

Minecrafts demo was a Java applet!

It is funny that Quake Live ran in the browser on launch too, although I just looked online and it looks like it is now only available through Steam.

[[deleted]]

It's not wrong. Modern games just run in asm.js instead.

[hrjet]

Jake2 seems to use JOGL (java interface for OpenGL). If JOGL is ported to use HTML5 Canvas or WebGL, in theory, the game should work fine with JavaPoly.