Review: Jake2

This is somewhat of a departure for me. I’ve been doing some work for my client that involves WebStart, a system that lets you deploy Java applications from a webserver without installing any local tools (aside from Webstart itself, natch). “A perfect avenue for games!”
So digging around, I started looking for games I could run via webstart (which, by the way, runs perfectly under Linux). I found Jake2.
Jake2 is a pure-java implementation of the Quake2 engine, from Id Software. If you have any interest in first person shooters, or haven’t been under a rock the last 7 years, you’ve heard of Quake. I had pulled Jake2 a while ago as a standalone app, and it was ‘okay’, but a bit bumpy. Since I still had my Q2 maps locally, I was able to just click on the Jake2 Webstart button on Bytonics webpage, say “Here are my maps” and I was off and running.
The game plays perfectly, with a high frame rate on my laptop, and seems to handle many of the issues of running “a full screen app in a window” quite well (the mouse motion does NOT move the ‘pointer’ off the window, and you suddenly stop moving, easy prey for the nasties lurking about).
I also was able to download a couple third party game maps, and install them into the baseq2 directory, and run around a bit. Only one caused Jake2 to crash out, and that could easily have been because of a bad map. The Id supplied maps were fine.
Next on the list will be to try using the networking code, and playing multiplayer. Moohahah.