This is very nice indeed, except it does not work on mobile devices.
Curious why you say so? Have you tested it?
WebGL works on mobile devices, not all browsers have caught up yet, but there is progress.
Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
61–70 of 141 posts
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
There aren't even any native Unreal Engine 4 games out yet that I'm aware of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unr... That's the purpose of this demo: to show that the Web stack is ready even for upcoming AAA games, not just ones from a few years ago.
Being ready for games doesn't mean games will come, just as U3 games haven't come (except for the one that hasn't shipped yet). Would be nice if Epic shipped one of their games; why haven't they?
Doesn't matter who ships, as long as it can be done without reasonable tradeoffs. The nature of the Web as we know it gives so many benefits in form of e.g. ease of deployment that it'd be outright wonder that there wouldn't soon be a rush of games exploiting the platform.
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
And better tooling helps here more than anything else. The giant elephant in the room nobody likes to speak towards is that Flash dominated not because it was a great language, but because they had awesome tooling around it. This is doing very little to address that. Now, the Unreal Engine is a great tool in and of itself. Having it target the browser is the questionable part to me.
Regarding tooling, I agree Flash's tools were a huge benefit for it. The same is true for engines like UE4 and its competitors, they all focus a lot on tooling. When those engines are ported to the web, the tools are part of that. Some tools might not just work, of course, like profiling tools or anything else that runs while the game executes on the target device, as opposed to the dev environment. But: 1. I have se…
Right, but it is safe to assume there will always be native targets for UE4. So, how will the web target really be a benefit? I can't imagine the DOM inspector will really be that useful in designing a 3d game. Am I wrong?
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fixed CPU workload makes sense. I mistakenly took it to mean they simply got within 67% of the framerate of native. Mayhap my misunderstanding is even deeper and those mean roughly the same thing. I'm still not sure I see the compelling use case. The tooling to create games that target various platforms already exists. Does this really widen the ballpark?
Measuring performance by framerate is tricky actually - it usually maxes out, and it's an inverse value, etc. It's a good quick measurement perhaps ("game X gets 50fps in Y but 60fps in Z", then clearly Z is better) but it's not an accurate measurement in many senses (for example both could get 60fps but one might use less CPU cycles). Measuring execution time for a fixed, deterministic non-stop workload is the best…
Makes sense. I still have to squint to really see the benefit here. :(
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding tooling, I agree Flash's tools were a huge benefit for it. The same is true for engines like UE4 and its competitors, they all focus a lot on tooling. When those engines are ported to the web, the tools are part of that. Some tools might not just work, of course, like profiling tools or anything else that runs while the game executes on the target device, as opposed to the dev environment. But: 1. I have se…
Right, but it is safe to assume there will always be native targets for UE4. So, how will the web target really be a benefit? I can't imagine the DOM inspector will really be that useful in designing a 3d game. Am I wrong?
The web target is mainly of benefit in getting to users, not in designing the game. For design, you would use the engine's normal tools for all targets anyhow, web included.
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#66I just bought Titanfall yesterday. I run this on a watercooled PC, dual GPU setup. I wouldn't have bought such a PC setup just to run at 60% of system performance. I think Mozilla is marketing this wrong. Triple-AAA titles go for squeezing every last ounce of system performance. I don't think there is anything to be gained to putting a game like Titanfall, which has 5 gigabytes of assets (some UE titles are much bigg…
Titanfall, to pick up your example, is running fine in 1080p on a mid-range card so i don't see why it couldn't run in the browser especially if you still had the option to go native so its up to Epic to make that painless for developers.
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#67This is very nice indeed, except it does not work on mobile devices.
It does work. I've ran UE3 demo in Firefox on Nexus 5.
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#68Its quite contrary to the approach onLive and Gaikai have been taking with streaming games from the cloud to any device that is able to output a video stream. I tried some Gaikai demos before they were acquired and to my surprise it worked very well. Both have their ups and downs but as i see it the ultimate endgoal would be your desktop in the cloud accessible from any device by realtime low-latency streaming. In that scenario gaming in the browser would still be possible but make a lot less sense.
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You ignored my 200% mark, though. If I could run this demo in the browser and it pegs all of my cpus, compared to running the same demo "native" and having half my system capable of idling, I'm not sure I see the win. Even if it gets to 100% of "native." (I hate that it sounds like I am claiming that is the case here, as I really don't know.)
A game like this is a singular and extreme case. I can see a really big win for lots of business software. With browser deployment, lots of logistical problems just disappear. Heck, the notion of traditional corporate structure starts to disappear: Corporations exist because they can provide lowered transaction costs in specific contexts of production. I'm not sure I see the win. Even if it gets to 100% of "native."…
How does this accomplish anything that Steam isn't already accomplishing, though? I have only bought humble bundles, and I already have a couple of hundred games on Steam. Tempted to buy more.
And I don't own a windows machine.
Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You ignored my 200% mark, though. If I could run this demo in the browser and it pegs all of my cpus, compared to running the same demo "native" and having half my system capable of idling, I'm not sure I see the win. Even if it gets to 100% of "native." (I hate that it sounds like I am claiming that is the case here, as I really don't know.)
> I'm not sure I see the win For a user that can install a native build, the native build will run better. No doubt. But, most users in the world do not know how to install apps, and even if they did they shouldn't because of security concerns. For that reason, game devs know that asking people to install a plugin or a native build will kill off most of the potential users of their game. Instead, if you just give peo…
Oh, so native programs are the boogey man now, huh? I don't know where this whole push for Everything Must Be JS comes from, all it does is waste electricity maxing out Core i7's running some raster demo from the 80s.