Show HN: In Browser, Serverless Quake 3 Arena

[jwally]

I wanted to play an FPS with my kids. Every option required creating accounts, installing launchers, granting permissions, downloading companion apps — a 20-minute ordeal before anyone fires a shot. Per person. I just wanted something that works.

So I (lets be honest, Claude) compiled Quake 3 to WebAssembly. One link, no installs, no accounts. Click Host, share the 4-letter code, and you're fragging. Game traffic goes peer-to-peer over WebRTC, signaling is a single Lambda function. The whole thing costs about $1/day under heavy load.

Notes: There's probably a ton here that could be better, faster, cooler. Please fork and DIY if you're into this sort of thing :-) https://github.com/JWally/web-quaker

[viraptor]

You're repo is private / 404. I was trying to find info about asset compilation for the server.

And is this is any way better than https://github.com/inolen/quakejs ?

[jwally]

Sorry about that...public now.

So the whole selling point of this approach is that after coordination with other browsers - the server is completely out of the picture. All telemetry is done peer-to-peer instead of coordinating with a central server for someone to maintain and pay for.

[vunderba]

Nice job. There's another one I've used in the past where you can play host/join Open Arena games which is a Q3 fork.

https://openarena.live

[jwally]

Thanks!

That's really cool - thanks for sharing!