Mozilla is teaming up with Epic Games with an aim of making the web a viable platform for modern 3D high performance games. To show its progress in JavaScript optimisations and collaboration with Epic Games in porting the Unreal Engine 3 to the web Mozilla demonstrated the Citadel demo running natively in a Firefox at Nvidia’s booth at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), San Francisco, yesterday.
Mozilla announced the news breathlessly via its blog “Today, we are excited to unlock this technology for high-performance games, by teaming up with Epic Games. By leveraging this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla has been able to bring Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. With this port, developers will soon be able to explore limitless possibilities when it comes to porting their popular gaming titles to the Web.”
Software technologies at play behind these in browser games include WebGL, Emscripten and asm.js. TechCrunch reports that “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”. Epic Games only took four days to port the Unreal Engine 3 to the web for Mozilla according to Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla’s engineering director and the inventor of WebGL. The asm.js code will run in any browser but run significantly faster in a browser with asm.js optimisations.
Aiming at mobile
If you have a modern PC that can run plenty of modern 3D gaming titles already, why would you want to run them in a browser? Mozilla’s answer seems to be in making portable mobile games that don’t need plugins (such as Flash) “As high-performance games on the Web move to rival native performance, Mozilla is also opening up the path to Web-based games on mobile. We are working with premium game publishers such as Disney, EA and ZeptoLab who are using the same technology to bring performance optimizations to their top-rated games.” Mozilla browsers on desktops, Android mobiles, and of course within the Firefox mobile OS, will be able to take advantage of these games.
