Unreal Engine 4 will run in Firefox without any plug-ins

When you think about Unreal Engine 4, the newest, shiniest game engine, you probably think about games that will require you to buy a new graphics card, not something that can run in your browser. But UE4 is built for both. Epic Games and Mozilla recently showed Epic Soul, a UE4 demo, running in Firefox at near-native speeds without plugins.

You might remember that Epic Games managed to do the same with UE3, when it showcased Epic Citadel running in Firefox . Both demos are using asm.js, a “supercharged” subset of JavaScript pioneered by Mozilla. The companies said that optimizations in the last year increased performance of web applications using asm.js from 40 percent to within 67 percent of native, and that they expect them to get even faster.

“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,” Founder and CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney said. “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.”

Epic and Mozilla will be at GDC 2014 next week, giving talks and demoing asm.js and other web technologies.