Unreal Engine 4 Coming to Browsers without Plugins

Unreal Engine 4 on Mozilla Firefox

You may recall that a year ago, Epic Games brought the Unreal Engine 3 to Firefox. Yesterday, Mozilla and Epic Games unveiled the first glimpse of Unreal Engine 4 running in Firefox with no plug-ins.

As with the Unreal Engine 3, this next-generation graphics engine runs on the JavaScript subset asm.js, which appears smooth currently but it not quite native. Though performance is optimized for Firefox, any modern browser can run asm.js content.

Mozilla & Epic Games are fast-tracking web-based gaming by bringing Unreal Engine 4 online http://t.co/YQzTFXrkVd by @imkialikethecar

— GamesBeat (@GamesBeat) March 12, 2014

Unreal Engine 4 heads to web browsers http://t.co/y1ZGBSjKdM

— Game Developer (@gamedevdotcom) March 12, 2014

Mozilla’s Brendan Eich said in a statement:

“Using Emscripten to cross-compile C and C++ into asm.js, developers can run their games at near-native speeds, so they can approach the web as they would any other platform.”

Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney added:

“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.”

See It

If you are attending the 2014 Game Developers Conference (GDC), held between March 17 and March 21, 2014 in San Francisco, you can see a the Unreal Engine 4 running in Firefox at both the Epic Games and Mozilla booths. The Firefox Nightly build optimized for Unreal Engine 4 should be available soon, as well as the Unreal Engine 4 demo site.