Hasta La Gadget!

Mozilla is trying its level best to defeat the perception that web browsers can’t offer console type gaming experience to users. Powered by Unreal Engine 3, Mozilla shows off Firefox browser playing a demonstration video of Epic Citadel, a popular Android game. The demonstration video isn’t full of missions, bounty hunts or fights, it is basically a walk through video which lets us see how smoothly Firefox is able to play it back. Within a desktop browser, graphics were running at a concrete frame rate of 16 FPS.

Epic Citadel was ported to Javascript and it can easily work in HTML5 without any plugins on anybody’s computer in which the game can be downloaded. Bringing the Unreal Engine 3 over to a web browser isn’t exactly an easy feat. This gaming engine powers up some of the biggest games, including but not limited to Batman: Arkham City, Bioshock Inifinte and Mass Effect 3. As part of its Emscripten project, Mozilla hopes to recruit new developers. Mozilla has provided a full demonstration video of Unreal Engine 3 in action inside Firefox web browser, which can be viewed above.

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A Holy Grail of Linux gaming has been an Unreal Engine 3 port. Getting one for the OS would unlock a world of games that has been the province of, well, just about any other mainstream platform. Thanks to Google preserving Flash on Linux through Chrome, that dream is alive in at least a rudimentary form. Experimenters at the Phoronix forums have found that Chrome 21 has support for the Stage 3D hardware acceleration needed to drive Epic Games’ Flash conversion of UE3. Tell Chrome to enable support as well as ignore a graphics chip blacklist, and suddenly you’re running Epic Citadel from your Linux install. When we say “running,” however, we’re taking a slight amount of poetic license. Performance isn’t that hot, and certain configurations might not show the medieval architecture in all its glory. We’ve confirmed with Epic that it works, but it’s still firm on the stance that there’s no plans for official UE3 support on Linux “at this time.” It’s still promising enough that maybe, just maybe, gamers can embrace an open-source platform without having to give up the games they love.

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 now working on Linux through Google Chrome, more or less originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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