Kill Some Time With Doom 3 In Your Browser

Sometimes you just want to play something in your browser to kill time. And sometimes you just need to knock off some demons to unwind. Now, there’s a way to combine both those things. Meet DOOM 3 (or the demo, at least) in your browser.

D3Wasm is basically an experiment to make the id Tech 4 engine playable in WebGL, WebAssembly and Emscripten, which is a long way of saying you can now play DOOM 3 in any browser. It runs on mobile phones too, although the game’s not optimised for touch controls, so it’s not really playable on those.

Note that this isn’t the full game, obviously, but only an experiment using the demo. The fact that it’s possible isn’t that hugely surprising, given that id software tried a similar experiment themselves with Quake Live many moons ago.

“Performance is decent – but not yet optimal – with around 30 FPS on a modern desktop system (ranges from 20 to 50 FPS),” coder Gabriel Cuvillier wrote. “The visuals are matching almost exactly those of the original game.”

It’s playable in all major browsers, although Edge and Opera weren’t officially tested at the time of writing. Safari works just fine if you’re on a Mac, however, and Firefox has been pretty good in the past when it comes to WebGL browser games, like the open source port of Tomb Raider.

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But if you’re sitting at work on your lunch break, and you’ve got some time to burn, why not give it a whirl?

The creator is the same person responsible for porting the Arx Fatalis demo to Web Assembly, which you can also play here.