Mozilla And Epic Games Bring Unreal Engine 3 To The Web

Back in 2011, Epic ported its popular Unreal Engine 3 technology to Flash and showed how relatively high-end 3D games could run in the browser. It’s 2013 now, however, and Flash isn’t exactly a hot topic anymore. So to show off what game developers can do with a modern browser and without plugins today, Mozilla and Epic teamed up a little while ago to port Unreal Engine 3 to the web, something that was unthinkable back in 2011.

As Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla’s engineering director and the inventor of WebGL told Frederic Lardinois 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 yesterday.