Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

Mozilla and Epic Games today released a preview of Unreal Engine 4, which runs in the Mozilla Firefox browser at near-native speeds. Mozilla and Epic Games have already ported Unreal Engine 3 to the Web in Epic Citadel, using asm.js, a supercharged subset of JavaScript pioneered by Mozilla. In less than 12 months, optimizations have increased the performance of Web applications using asm.js from 40% to within 67% of native, and Epic Games expects it to get even faster. Any modern browser can run asm.js content, but specific optimizations are only present in Firefox right now.

We were blown away by what this Mozilla-pioneered technology achieved with Unreal Engine 3 on the Web, so we had no hesitation in working with Mozilla to port Unreal Engine 4, said Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO, Epic Games. 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.

The gameplay looks pretty smooth as you can see from the video below. The Epic Soul portion of the demo looks great and it looks like you won’t be needing plugins for gaming in the future!