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Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#41

Post by azakai »

cromwellian wrote: post #37

I 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…

As the video shows, this is not just about the highest-end AAA games, there is a 2D platformer there too.

But the important thing in working to port the highest-end games is to push the limits of the web platform, so it can be better optimized. Before UE3 was ported, people were - rightfully! - skeptical any such engine would work well on the web at all, and that port helped get to that point (and now to UE4).

Also, note that the 60% is of CPU performance. You also get close to 100% of GPU performance using WebGL. So overall it will be even closer to native speed (depending on how the specific game balances between CPU and GPU).

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#42

Post by nawitus »

MichaelGG wrote: post #18
taeric wrote: post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

Especially considering that asm.js isn't really using a JS execution engine. You can smuggle a low-level machine code via any mechanism. As I understand, without asm.js specific optimizations, it doesn't really work. I know, it's a cute way to get some movement without the political nightmare of having to decide on a proper VM for the web. Since it's "just JavaScript", other browsers will run but be really slow, lead…

And if you run that code in a non-asm.js browser, it'll still be compiled to native code if the application benefits from it.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#43

Post by azakai »

taeric wrote: post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

"67% of native speed" means that for a fixed CPU workload, it will take 1.5 times longer to run. Of course this depends a lot on the benchmark, some run better and some run worse.

Note also that this is on the CPU. On the GPU, WebGL is already extremely close to native GPU speed.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#45

Post by azakai »

onedognight wrote: post #33
ebbv wrote: post #27

They say "without plugins" but that's kind of misleading. Firefox includes asm.js functionality, but no other browser does. Just because it's included by default doesn't mean it's not a plugin. Chrome includes Flash by default, it's still a plugin.

asm.js is a subset of JS, so by the conventional definition, it is not a plugin. The game should run, albeit slowly, on other browsers.

I would not say "slowly" - that sounds like it is objectively sluggish for the user, which is not the case. Try the Epic Citadel demo in chrome - works great.

Depends on the benchmark, on many Chrome has already caught up, on others perhaps not. But there is constant improvement here.

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#46

Post by taeric »

azakai wrote: post #43
taeric wrote: post #7

This is neat and all, but I wonder if things are really better moving to "in the browser." The discussion is of "upwards of 60% as fast as native." Is this using the same amount of processing power as native, or is this "67% as fast as native, using 200% of the CPU as a native solution?" I mean, I realize that processors and machines are only getting more capable. It seems silly to start requiring faster and faster p…

"67% of native speed" means that for a fixed CPU workload, it will take 1.5 times longer to run. Of course this depends a lot on the benchmark, some run better and some run worse. Note also that this is on the CPU. On the GPU, WebGL is already extremely close to native GPU speed.

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?

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#47

Post by ChuckMcM »

This is really cool, I've always had a soft spot for the Unreal Engine. But it reminds me once again, why the hell does Flash even exist any more? While I get the whole "HTML5 wars" thing, I've done standards and I know how those get mired in the muck, but if you can write a game engine with this level of performance, writing an open source 'flash' equivalent should be pretty doable right? And open source and open tools and don't bother with the quacking of the standards guys, just focus on something that works right?

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#48

Post by mschuster91 »

All the asm.js stuff... well, they still haven't ported UE3/UT3 to Linux, haven't they?

Sidenote: IIRC all UE code is cross-platform compatible - so shouldn't it be possible to fuse the UE3 JS engine port and the UT3 content to provide a "cross platform UT3"?

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#49

Post by SEMW »

zanny wrote: post #34
abhinavk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serving videos off YouTube allows them to avoid bandwidth costs. P.S.: YouTube uses their HTML5 player wherever possible.

I have youtube html5 video on, and it only works on adless videos. This one, for example, doesn't use the html5 player.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...

Re: Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox

#50

Post by dave809 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #47

This is really cool, I've always had a soft spot for the Unreal Engine. But it reminds me once again, why the hell does Flash even exist any more? While I get the whole "HTML5 wars" thing, I've done standards and I know how those get mired in the muck, but if you can write a game engine with this level of performance, writing an open source 'flash' equivalent should be pretty doable right? And open source and open to…

Mozilla is working on it :) http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
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