October 9, 2012

Web browsing? Check

It’s Berkelium running on a shader. It uses Google Chrome, so does roundabout what Chrome does, including play Flash videos. It’s actually interactive, although there are still some bugs.

Needless to say, an FTEQW feature.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 at 9:01 am and posted in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

13 responses to “Web browsing? Check”

RawShark
October 9th, 2012 at 9:18 am

Are you fracking serious?!!! That’s an awesome feature. I can think of cool ways to change standard FPS gameplay based on this. Find the red key? I don’t think so. Find, download and decrypt the key? Better 🙂

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Chip
October 9th, 2012 at 12:49 pm

Darkplaces had this feature, using Gecko engine, the same Mozilla is based on. There’s not much you could with it, unless you add lots of engine features. You could have a closed-source connection, and have some custom web sites, or web applications used by the characters in the game, something like GTA4, but then you’d add web connectivity as a requirement to the game.

Not sure about it myself, it’s just a nice engine feature.

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kneedeepinthedoomed
October 9th, 2012 at 6:37 pm

Pretty sure FTE supports both Gecko and Berkelium. Anyway, you are both right.
If the player doesn’t have internet / doesn’t have the browser and the plugin installed, the monitor will just stay black or display an error. Yep, that’s a problem as soon as you require the browser for gameplay.

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kneedeepinthedoomed
October 9th, 2012 at 6:40 pm

However, from a geek point of view, this is a gadget that’s beyond cool. If you want to listen to Slipknot while killing zombies, or read the game’s walkthrough without quitting the game, you can do it. You can also have games-in-the-game.

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Spike
October 10th, 2012 at 12:01 am

Chip, Darkplaces no longer supports the OffscreenGecko library (due to it no longer being maintained).
It also required csqc/menuqc and to be used in strictly 2d.
Additionally, I’m not aware of it being possible for the browser to actually affect the game.

FTE allows this to be placed on walls, as part of a shader. While you still need csqc/menuqc if you want to give the browser any input, you can still display it without, or use it as a media decoder and display it fullscreen with just a stuffcmd (the playfilm command).

Currently there’s still no way for the browser to affect the game, but the callbacks are available to me, I’ve just not plugged them in to anything, as it were.
As with all new features, usability is a major thorn…

If security is an issue for you, you can just remove the plugin to disable this feature. Otherwise you’d be expected to restrict the browser to known sites, for both security and immersion.
But yeah, “playfilm http://google.com” will ‘just work’. No need for csqc or anything if your mod uses that.

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Chip
October 10th, 2012 at 4:24 pm

Thanks for clearing it up, Spike. I used to play with some old versions of Darkplaces.

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Spiney
October 12th, 2012 at 12:22 pm

Can you play video, or does that require additional functionality?

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- kneedeepinthedoomed
  October 12th, 2012 at 12:28 pm
  
  You can play youtube videos for instance, yeah.
  
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Mike_Tyson
October 18th, 2012 at 4:33 pm

This is seriously cool, I was generally thinking about the possiblity of including an interactive browser into games, too, and what you could do with it. I am not sure if you *can* actually do something with this feature that enhances the gameplay experience, but hopefully I’ll be proven wrong. I think it depends much on what you actually need to do with the browser in-game, and how you achieve it, i.e. how you interact with the browser… I find this a bit difficult to imagine actually. Shenmue on Dremcast had a nice feature where the camera vieport angle changes when you inspect maps, posters and detailed stuff in the 3D world – something like this could be useful when interacting with such a browser.

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Andrew Dean
March 11th, 2013 at 1:16 pm

See, for me one of the killer features of Doom 3 (when comparing all the different id engines/games) is that I love the interactive terminals. It’d be great to build in something like that, using this. I wonder if it would be possible to implement an extremely basic web server, whether in-engine or via separate executable. Then, it might be possible to say connect to localhost:9874 – and just hope that the user has that port available!

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- kneedeepinthedoomed
  March 11th, 2013 at 11:07 pm
  
  I’m not sure, but I do think you can do stuff like that with FTE. IIRC you can run an X server in FTE; I forget if the same is true for a web server. Ask Spike?
  
  I agree that the GUIs in Doom 3 are nice; however, all they are in gameplay terms is glorified buttons tbh.
  
  But yes, you could probably imitate these clickable GUIs by having a web browser running on a shader and having it point to a local file. Should work. I haven’t tried this in a while, actually, but last time I checked the browser plugin worked best under Windows; not sure if the Linux input stuff has been fixed enough to make it similarly usable. I know Spike added xinput2 support, I should probably try the browser again!
  
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  - Andrew Dean
    March 12th, 2013 at 9:39 am
    
    I shall figure out how to ask this Spike and do so, thanks. I know what you mean about them being essentially glorified buttons. My project that I am considering making could be likened a little to the original Deus Ex, so, I’m looking for a way to ‘hack’ terminals and the like. There are a lot of possible ways to do that, the Doom 3-esque approach is just one.
    
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    - kneedeepinthedoomed
      March 12th, 2013 at 9:46 am
      
      You can PM Spike at e.g. the inside3d.com forums. Hacking terminals sounds pretty cool, and can probably not easily be done in QuakeC unless you do a minigame for the actual hacking such as in Bioshock.
      
      Reply