Unreal Engine coming to Google Chrome and Opera
Unreal Engine 3 on Chrome and Opera
If you call, back in March it was announced that the Unreal 3 Engine could play in Firefox without plugins. Today, the Mozilla blog announced that Google Chrome and Opera have joined Mozilla in bringing the 3D game engine to life inside a web browser.
As of Chrome 31 and Opera 18, Epic Games has now cleared these browsers for running Epic Citadel in addition to Firefox. It is very exciting to see two more browsers optimize for this technology and expand the audience that can experience high performance plugin free game play directly in the browser using asm.js and WebGL.
Check it out!
Running any of the three supported browsers (with their supported releases), you can visit the Epic Citadel HTML5 website to play through the demo!
Impressive. It worked on my system just now under Chrome and was reasonably smooth (30+ fps without checking). I wonder if Unity can similarly publish games with a reasonable collection of code and art assets from its ecosystem. SotA could be played on many more devices were that the case (anything with Chrome or another decent standards-compliant browser).
On an artistic note, the demo’s architectural models rely too heavily on either overly intricate or generally flat geometry. Normal maps are used extensively to give depth to surfaces, but a realistic balance of geometric and textural detail isn’t there. Probably not an engine problem though; just the demo app.
I would think that anything that kept each level fairly small would not have a problem with it. The issue with something like SotA would be the addition of multiplayer. Tracking dozens of players requires a backend server, which SotA doesn’t plan to have, so it would need to dynamically shard to one of the clients. As far as I know, there isn’t a way to do that in the browser.
Unity does have a plugin for most web browsers, but I have not seen anything to indicate they are looking into this type of barebones solution.
I think the demo level (Unreal Citadel) is designed to test different types of graphical effects in different areas of the flythrough. Thus, you can find what areas might be sore spots when focused on a specific browser. The same level, by the way, is available on iOS and Android, similarly to test benchmarks across device ranges.