In gaming some of the most popular games are first person shooters. The latest versions of Call of Duty Modern Wareware break global sales records year after year and FPS online gaming, in general, continues to draw in players.
One of the reasons why the internet has yet to see a fully developed FPS shooter in WebGL is because, up until now, browsers did not support a ‘mouse lock’ feature. Mouse Lock is a function that enables the browser to lock the movements to a particular module on a webpage (ie: the webgl canvas element) and provides the 360 degree sense of rotational movement that we’ve all been taking for granted since the days of Wolfenstein 3D.
Two days ago Google released an experimental version of Google Chrome called Canary which supports ‘mouse lock’ as an experimental feature. This is awesome news because it brings us all one step closer to playing Counter Strike inspired games straight from the browser.
Brandon Jones of tojicode.com has enabled mouse locking support for his Quake 3 Demo.
In order to test for yourself, follow these instructions (inspired by Vincent Scheib).
- Download the latest Google Chrome Canary Build here.
- Enable pointer lock by typing about:flags in the url, find Enable Pointer Lock, and relaunch Google Canary
- Open Brandon Jone’s Quake 3 Demo
- Go Fullscreen by pressing F11 or hitting the Fullscreen button.
- Allow the site to disable your mouse cursor.
- Be inspired by the immersive experience.
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WebGL – Quake 3 demo
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