There's no doubt that the original Doom and its sequel can run even on a Lego brick, but what about Doom 3? Its technical requirements are far superior, and at launch it could melt several computers... but it's almost 20 years old by now, which makes it a great candidate for new experiments. D3WASM is one of them, and it essentially presents us with a port of the id Tech 4 engine, created with a combination of Emscripten, WebAssembly, and WebGL for running in modern browsers.
Doom 3 is one of the most peculiar titles in the entire franchise. The folks at id Software decided to abandon the fast and ultra-violent profile of the early games to adopt a slower and more tactical style, with a very dense atmosphere, claustrophobic scenarios, and prevailing darkness. At the same time, Doom 3 imposed very high hardware requirements, which put some players in a bind.
Playing Doom 3 in the Browser with D3WASM
Today, the situation has completely changed. With two decades under its belt, Doom 3 has become the go-to benchmark for retro systems, but modern computers should have no trouble running it. With that in mind, we come to D3WASM, a port of the id Tech 4 engine compatible with current browsers like Chrome and Firefox. The project uses the official Doom 3 demo, and I must admit it works very well.
The initial download isn't too large (about 20 megabytes), but once the game starts, you'll need to wait for it to save nearly 400 megabytes locally. The rest is a matter of configuring Doom 3, improving its graphics, changing key bindings, and other details. The latest D3WASM update dates back to last February, when its creator Gabriel Cuvillier managed to reduce the size of the binaries by 35 percent, and increase overall performance by 50 percent.
Gabriel also explains on the official page that it is possible to run the full version of Doom 3, as long as the user accepts a web page devouring more than 2 GB of RAM (to be honest, a snack for Chrome). Now, this conversion is between 40 and 60 percent slower than the native edition, partly due to the lack of multithreading. In any case, the demo is excellent, and definitely worth your time.
Official site: Click here
