Unreal Engine 4 Is Running Great In Firefox

Unreal Engine 4 will be capable of running within web-browsers using WebGL and it's already been demoed running within Mozilla Firefox. Firefox running UE4 is at "near-native speeds" to the desktop version.

A Mozilla Firefox channel on YouTube has uploaded a video showing the Unreal Engine 4 demos of Soul and Swing Ninja running in the open-source web-browser. Unreal Engine 4 has an OpenGL renderer and apparently has WebGL support just as Unreal Engine 3 ended up having for earlier UE3 Firefox demos. Those interested in seeing Unreal Engine 4 running in Firefox right now, the video is embedded at the end of this article.

Next week at the Game Developers Conference will also be a session about OpenGL with Unreal Engine 4. "This talk will focus on the path toward bringing a fully capable OpenGL renderer to Unreal Engine 4. It will cover the challenges of mapping to the API, cross-platform shader management, porting to Android, and the steps needed to get great performance. Additionally, well dive into the Tegra K1 processor and demonstrate how having a fully functional OpenGL path enables high-quality rendering on a handheld device powered by Tegra K1."

With running on Android and NVIDIA's Tegra K1 already, we will hopefully see native Linux support from the starting gate... I'll try to find out more details when I'm out at GDC next week. Unreal Engine 4 should be very promising with its many visual breakthroughs through using voxel cone tracing for real-time global illumination, improvements for game creators, advanced GPU particle simulation and collision, and other features over Unreal Engine 3, which to date has only been used by a few Linux games.