Unreal Engine 3 Ported to Run in Firefox Without Additional Plugins

[Shawn Zipay]

In just four days, Epic ported over the Unreal Engine 3 to Firefox. This followed months of work from the Mozilla team to get the structure in place to make this possible at all.

As Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla’s engineering director and the inventor of WebGL told me earlier this week, Mozilla wants to make the web a viable platform for modern games. About six months ago, Mozilla started to work on using its emscripten compiler to port C and C++ code to asm.js, a strict subset of JavaScript. This combination allows the JavaScript code to run at a speed within 2x of native performance and the latest versions of Firefox Nightly now support these optimizations. Given the complexities of modern game engines and games, getting relatively close to native performance is a necessity for running something like Epic’s well-known Citadel demo and Unreal Tournament, which Mozilla showed running natively in the browser at the Game Developers Conference today.

The demo can be tried out on the most recent nightly builds of the browser. It will be coming soon to the final public builds.

What does this mean for future potential? Mozilla is already working with Disney, Electronic Arts, and ZeptLab for potential title releases on Firefox.

(via TechCrunch)

[Anarchy1]

That's pretty cool actually.

Does this require the same CPU/GPU power as if it were running standalone?

[cikame]

Your move Chrome i guess.