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Mozilla and Epic Games team up to bring Unreal Engine 3 to the Web

Mozilla and Epic Games have announced this week that they have teamed up to port the Unreal Engine 3 to the Web without the need for any plugins.

The browser company has long wanted to make the Internet a viable platform for modern games, and "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," says TechCrunch.



For a demo, the companies showed off Epic's Citadel demo and Unreal Tournament running natively from within the browser.

Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla's engineering director and the inventor of WebGL, says the port only took four days and required minor adjustments.



Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 28 Mar 2013 10:17

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• 1 comment

• Bozobub

  Sounds cool, until you realize that this is merely the next salvo in the "cloud computing" war to turn everyone's PC into a "net appliance", rather than a real PC, which is dependent on an always-on, high bandwidth internet connection.
  
  The corporate world would love NOTHING more than turning everyone's PC back into a graphical terminal (AKA "thin client"). This way they can ensure that you pay fees for every single activity, from storing your data in the "cloud" to running a web-based app or game. Hell, M$ even directly stated the reason for emphasizing cloud computing was to ensure a constant revenue stream; it has never had anything to do with benefit (except in a secondary, emergent manner) for consumers.

  28.3.2013 11:24 #1