Mozilla says that thanks to the upcoming Unreal Engine 4 from Epic, the Web is significantly closer to the goal of Web-based games that rock at the speed of native code. Just in time for the annual Game Developers Conference to be held in San Francisco next week, the joint Mozilla and Epic project demonstrates Unreal Engine 4 running on the Web in Firefox without plugins.
Around this time last year Mozilla and Epic Games showed off the Unreal 3 game engine running in the browser, using a combination of the WebGL 3D graphics API and asm.js, the high performance subset of JavaScript. Commercial games built using this technology were launched late in the year. With this apparently successful foray into using the browser as a rich gaming platform, Mozilla and Epic today demonstrated a preview of Epic’s next engine, Unreal Engine 4, again boasting near-native speeds. The Web version of UE4 uses Emscripten to compile regular C and C++ code into asm.js.