Days ahead of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mozilla and Epic Games have announced that they are bringing Unreal Engine 4 framework to the web.
Mozilla showed an early preview of the game engine working with Firefox. The demo had “Epic’s Soul” and “Swing Ninja” videos running within the Mozilla’s browser without the use of plugins.
At last year’s Game Developers Conference, Mozilla partnered with Epic, the creators of the most-used middleware in gaming, to port the Unreal Engine 3 to the Web that was demonstrated as a proof-of-concept.
Mozilla has been working on asm.js, the high-performance subset of JavaScript, and the Emscripten compiler that takes complex C/C++ code and turns it into asm.js code that can run on any browser (both of which could not work without WebGL).
“Any modern browser can run asm.js content, but specific optimizations currently present only in Firefox, ensure the most consistent and smooth experience,” Mozilla said.
“This technology has reached a point where games users can jump into via a Web link are now almost indistinguishable from ones they might have had to wait to download and install,” said Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering at Mozilla.
“Using Emscripten to cross-compile C and C++ into asm.js, developers can run their games at near-native speeds, so they can approach the Web as they would any other platform.”
Mozilla claims that the performance of web applications has been optimised using asm.js from 40 percent to 67 percent native speed over the last 12 months and that it will get even better. The companies believe porting of Unreal Engine 4 to be the testament to the power of the Web.
