Unreal Engine coming to Mozilla Firefox without plugins

Unreal Engine 3 on Mozilla Firefox

A post on the Unreal Engine Facebook page points to today’s Mozilla Blog post, where the barriers for game development have been sheared thinner than ever before.

Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming

Mozilla, thanks to JavaScript optimization, has been able to offer lightweight, native implementation of 3D games in Firefox. Today, they have partnered with Epic Games to bring a port of Unreal Engine 3 to Firefox, without plug-ins of any kind.

This allows developers to submit games using the Unreal Engine 3 to the Firefox Marketplace.

You may recall that Unreal Engine 3 was ported to Flash a few years back. Because of the advance of HTML5 and the profusion of devices that did not support Flash, that platform was never fully utilized by developers. With this native port, any WebGL-supported browser may potentially support high-resolution, fully 3D platform game play.

There is no word yet as to whether this will ever be offered for UDK (Unreal Development Kit), but the possibilities are astounding.