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Mozilla partners with Unity to bring games to the browser

Mozilla partners with Unity to bring games to the browser
Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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Mozilla and Unity are partnering up to bring gaming to the web. Using web standards like WebGL and JavaScript, Mozilla hopes to expand gaming in the browser.

Although browser games have exited for a long time, they were usually casual games and weren’t immersive. This changes with Unity and the Unreal Engine 4. Check out the video below to see the Unreal Engine 4 running in Firefox.

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Mozilla gave a demonstration on how immersive and graphically powerful web gaming can be at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Games like Dead Trigger 2 played flawlessly and featured impressive graphics that were better than the mobile version.

Lighting, reflections, and shadows all made Dead Trigger 2 look like a game that was installed locally. Firefox achieves this by using hardware acceleration, which means the browser can use a computer’s graphics card instead of being limited to using the CPU.

Even though Mozilla was using an experimental build of Firefox, the games were stable.

There are 2 billion people online, so that’s a massive market we can tap into.

Mozilla thinks gaming on the web will be a big thing. “There are 2 billion people online, so that’s a massive market we can tap into,” said Mozilla software engineer Martyn Haigh.

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The hassle of installing proprietary plugins has always been a barrier for the web in general. Mozilla gets rid of the need to install plugins for games by using web standards like WebGL and an optimized version of JavaScript. Games using Unity will work across browser that have adopted web standards. Chrome will theoretically be supported but Internet Explorer will not since it’s not standards compliant.

Mozilla’s war on plugins can be seen with the latest versions of Firefox. The browser requires plugins to be whitelisted or to be clicked on to play.

Using Unity, game developers can easily export their game to many different platforms including consoles, smart phones, PC, and the web. Porting games takes significant time and effort but Unity solves that.

Version 5 of Unity will launch mid-2014 with the WebGL add-on.

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Lewis Leong

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