Epic Games and Mozilla released a video today showing Unreal Engine 4 running in the Firefox web browser, demonstrating "the power of the Web as a platform for gaming" in a post on the Mozilla blog.
The video above shows Epic's "Soul" and "Swing Ninja" Unreal Engine 4 demos running at near-native speeds in Firefox. This is also the first showcase of Unreal Engine 4 running on a web browser without plugins. According to the post, the engine is being designed to scale between consoles, mobile devices, PC and the web.
"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," Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering Brendan Eich wrote.
"We were blown away by what this Mozilla-pioneered technology achieved with Unreal Engine 3 on the Web, so we had no hesitation in working with Mozilla to port Unreal Engine 4," added Epic Games' Tim Sweeney. "We believe the Web has a crucial part to play in the future of game development and deployment, and Mozilla has proven it is the catalyst to make this happen."
In March 2013, Mozilla and Epic announced Unreal Engine 3 was being ported to the web. According to Mozilla, in less than a year optimizations to the program have increased the performance of web apps using asm.js — a Mozilla-favored "subcharged" subset of the JavaScript programming language — from 40 percent to 67 percent.
"This performance opens up new opportunities for giving users an astonishing and delightful experience, from within their choice of web browser," reads the post. "Any modern browser can run asm.js content, but specific optimizations currently present only in Firefox, ensure the most consistent and smooth experience."
