I remember when running Quake 3 Arena required a pretty decent PC with dedicated 3D acceleration. It wasn't something that just anyone could run. Now we have cell phones running id Software's modern multiplayer classic.
A developer known as Thunderbird2k has ported Quake 3 to Android in a project known as kwaak3, which is open source and can be found here.
The developer did his testing on a Motorola Milestone (also known as the Droid) and was able to achieve benchmark results of 20.0 fps with sound and 25.4 fps without. The HTC Hero scored 11.5 fps and 14.5 fps in the same conditions.
"When I received a Motorola Milestone phone, I wanted to get into Android development. I had seen ports of Quake3 to the iphone and the N900 which have similar specifications (all use a similar CPU and the PowerVR GPU), so I thought why not bring Quake3 to Android," the developer wrote. "It only took me a day to get the game to compile and to load the Quake3 main-function. After that it took me a few more days to get OpenGL and some input working. In the weeks following the initial port I added touchscreen support, networking and sound."
We've given the Android port a quick test here on our Droid and can confirm that it runs astonishingly well. We can't wait to try it on a Nexus One, which features a faster set of chips.
Check out the video below from Android and Me.
