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[This feature was published in the June 2013 edition of Develop magazine, which is available through your browser and on iPad.]
The web just became a much friendlier platform for beautiful, high-quality games, thanks to the latest advances in web technologies and Epic’s ongoing collaboration with Mozilla.
Engineering teams at Mozilla and Epic Games recently ported Unreal Engine 3 to the web in just four days using the powerful combination of asm.js, a highly optimised subset of JavaScript, and Emscripten, which enables developers to compile C++ code into JavaScript.
THE SCALE OF THINGS TO COME
Epic then demonstrated Unreal Tournament 3 in HTML5 at the Game Developers Conference and released Epic Citadel on the web running in HTML5.
Developers can now achieve fast performance that rivals native while leveraging the scale of the web, without the additional costs associated with third-party plug-ins. Bringing visually stunning, performance-intensive games to billions of people on the web is now a reality.
Epic Citadel is built using standards-based technologies such as HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript, and should work in any standards-based browser implementing those features.
FPS ACCELERATED
The app’s benchmarking mode has been a big hit with the community as well. Many users have posted screenshots with readouts of 150 fps and higher.
To try Epic Citadel for HTML5, download Firefox Nightly at nightly.mozilla.org and then visit unrealengine.com/html5 for a preview of the future of gaming on the web. Instructions on how to unlock the framerate are located within the FAQ.
To read all of Develop’s Unreal Diaries, visit our archive
