Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124
MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well."
Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.
Re:I don't care (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of plugins are only built for 32-bit browsers. It is a lot more work to get 32-bit plugins working in a 64-bit browser than in a 32-bit browser. Plus, there is no real advantage to using a 64-bit browser unless you want it to use more than 2gb of memory, and I thought one of the common complaints was that Firefox uses too much memory?
I'm not sure what you think the big deal is.
"new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.'" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
I've ued 64bit builds of nightly for some time now.
The issue is getting plugins to play nice.
You can't really blame Mozilla for not wanting to jump the shark, when they will catch all the flames for plugin makers who refuse to make their plugins 64bit friendly.
Right now, it's "whaaaaaa! I want 64bit builds!"
They offer a 64bit build, and then its "whaaaa! Flash plugin doesn't work! Noscript doesn't work! Adblock Plus doesn't work! Its horrible, and it crashes to boot!"
The market has to build up enough pressure to push out the colonic obstructions in the way of 64bit adoption as the new standard. It will take awhile.
Remember the good old days? (Score:2, Insightful)
When "browsers" were used for "browsing" the web, instead of being crappy application platforms with endless non-browsing-related features shoehorned into them? What happened to just browsing well instead of doing everything else poorly?
Not me (Score:2, Insightful)
I for one won't ever buy any games that run in the cloud and/or you have to play through a browser.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not me (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fine. Plenty of people are doing it already. So nobody that matters really cares what you think.
Re:Remember the good old days? (Score:4, Insightful)
This. The web is popular because it's a simple way to deploy something that works across different OSes and different devices. On the users' part, no installation isrequired, and web apps are safely sandboxed. The web is thriving because of the shortcomings of native platforms.
"near-native performance"? (Score:3, Insightful)
It says that it's twice as slow as native c code. This must be a new definition of the word "near".
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Remember the good old days? (Score:5, Insightful)
"them" could be anyone, including you. Spinning up Apache is something any beginner developer can work through. Or even better, just pay 3$ a month for a place to host your stuff. Now you are one of "them". I understand your argument but it's like saying we shouldn't use wikipedia because they could nuke the website tomorrow to spite us. I don't want to go back to Encarta on a CD.
Re:"near-native performance"? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the computing world that's close enough that noone really cares. With a traditional interpreted language (like javascript interpreters used to be) you're looking at something more in the range of 100-10000x slowdown.