Mozilla To Bring Unreal Engine 3 To Firefox Without Plugins

Epic games have teamed up with Mozilla to bring the Unreal Engine 3 to the Firefox browser without any plugins. The announcement was made at the Game Developers Conference 2013 event where Mozilla showed off Unreal Tournament and the Citadel demo running naively in the Firefox web browser.

Whether this is an indication of the skill of Mozilla’s engineers or the simplicity of the task they engaged in, the fact that Mozilla only needed four days to port the entire Unreal 3 engine to the web is impressive stuff. Vladimir Vukicevic, Mozilla’s engineering director and inventor of WebGL, said that only minor adjustments were needed to get the port to work. Support for the Unreal Engine 3 will also come to Mozilla’s mobile browser and the Firefox OS. There is a performance hit involved, you should expect to see something like half the true native performance, but this will surely be optimised over time, and the fact it even works altogether is impressive in itself.

This isn’t the first web-stunt by Epic Games, they tried a similar trick with Adobe’s Flash Player allowing their titles to be played in a number of browsers and on many social networking sites. Yet since then Adobe Flash Player has all but died and so Epic Games have sought to bring their web presence back through Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

A demo is expected to be available in the next few weeks but until then “interested parties are urged to check out Mozilla’s BananaBread demo that’s works with the latest Firefox Nightly” according to TechSpot.

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