Web-based games in your browser are nothing new, and most of the time, you would not expect something that is equal to what you can find on a console to run in your Web browser. Well, Mozilla intends to change that line of thought by working alongside Epic Games. Epic Games happens to be the ones behind the most-used middleware in gaming, and in this latest partnership, both companies will deliver the Unreal Engine 4 framework to the web right in time for the Game Developers Conference that is kicking off in San Francisco next week.
It was just last year that both Mozilla and Epic Games ported the Unreal Engine 3 over to the Web, but it was demonstrated just as a proof of concept. I guess 2014 will be the year when the technology becomes available for developers to start cranking titles out. Considering how many people do indulge in browser-based, it is nice to see technology play catch up in this particular area.
Mozilla has been working on asm.js, which happens to be a low-level subset of JavaScript that has a special focus on speed and performance. It is said that Mozilla’s team has now gotten asm.js’s speed down to 1.5 times that of native applications, which is an achievement considering how one year back, it was twice as slow. Right now, Mozilla’s Firefox browser happens to be the most optimized for asmj.js, although Chrome and Opera are not too far behind.