Categories: Gaming

GDC 2014: Mozilla and Partners Prove the Web is the Platform for Gaming

Last year at the Game Developers Conference, Mozilla unlocked the Web as a powerful platform for gaming by presenting asm.js, a highly-optimized version of JavaScript that allows a developer to bring C/C++ games to the web and reach near-native speeds. We showed that asm.js paired with WebGL and Web Audio enables fast, rich, and immersive 3D gaming experiences on the Web without plugins.

This year Mozilla is building on this momentum by working with some of the biggest names in the gaming industry as well as innovative web-based tool providers to bring their products to the Web. With these tools, developers working on all kinds of games will be able to more easily create and collaborate on new games and port their existing gaming titles directly to the Web, while enjoying the scale of Web distribution without the friction associated with plugins.

Mozilla is also opening up the path to 3D Web-based games on mobile, thanks to the near-native performance of asm.js. Leveraging the Web as a platform for gaming on mobile gives developers significantly more flexibility in reaching players and delivering content. These technologies already work well in Firefox for Android and will be coming to Firefox OS later this year.

Unity 5:
Mozilla and Unity are announcing new deployment tools bringing Unity-authored games to the Web. With its upcoming Unity 5 game engine and WebGL add-on developers will now be able to export their content directly to the Web using WebGL and asm.js, reaching millions more people than is possible with a plugin solution.

Epic Unreal Engine 4:
Mozilla and Epic Games are demonstrating how the Web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform for gaming by porting Unreal Engine 4 to the Web and providing a sneak peek of Epic’s Soul demo, running in Firefox at near-native speeds thanks to asm.js optimizations. Last year, Mozilla and Epic Games generated significant excitement around the Web as a platform for gaming by showing Unreal Engine 3 running on the Web and showcasing Epic Citadel.

At GDC, NomNom Games will be showcasing their upcoming title Monster Madness. The game is based off the original Unreal Engine 3 work done by Mozilla and Epic and is an amazing example of a full multiplayer game powered by WebGL + asm.js. The game will be online during GDC at www.monstermadness.com and NomNom expect to release it in May.

New Web-based Game Development Tools:
Game development tools built on Web technologies are emerging as a new way to help developers build HTML5 games. Targeted at developers that are familiar with the Web and prefer the ease of JavaScript development, these tools often make use of asm.js to optimize specific areas, such as speeding up physics computations by using an asm.js port of the popular Ammo physics library. They are a great example of using asm.js libraries alongside more traditional JavaScript as a showcase of what is now possible on the modern Web.

PlayCanvas
PlayCanvas offers advanced collaborative tools for creating games for the Web, allowing people to work remotely and edit the same content, all live and within the Web browser. On Mozilla’s booth at GDC, PlayCanvas will be demonstrating what’s possible with their tool with the Swoop demo, running on both desktop and mobile. PlayCanvas will also be showing Dungeon Fury on Firefox OS.

Goo Technologies:
Goo’s gaming platform will also be showcased on Mozilla’s booth at GDC and consists of Goo Engine, a 3D JavaScript gaming engine entirely built on WebGL and HTML5, and Goo Create, a visual editing tool built on top of that engine. Goo Create can be used to create everything from simple product visualizations to interactive ads to entire games, all built on top of the modern Web.

To see all these technologies and demos in action, come visit the Mozilla booth #206, Epic booth #1224 or Unity booth #1402 at GDC.