Epic Games and Mozilla have continued a close collaboration first revealed during last month’s Game Developers Conference to release “Epic Citadel” on the Web running in HTML5. No plug-ins or added components are needed to experience the free app.
“Epic Citadel” is built using standards-based technologies like HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript, and should work in any standards-based browser implementing those features. For optimal performance, Epic recommends loading “Epic Citadel” at http://www.unrealengine.com/html5 using Firefox Nightly version 23 or above, which includes optimizations for asm.js, a highly-optimizable subset of JavaScript pioneered by Mozilla, whose performance can rival native code.
According to Mozilla’s recent blog post, “With Mozilla’s latest innovations in JavaScript, game developers and publishers can now take advantage of fast performance that rivals native while leveraging scale of the Web, without the additional costs associated with third-party plugins. This allows them to distribute visually stunning and performance intensive games to billions of people more easily and cost effectively than before.”
Engineering teams at Mozilla and Epic ported the award-winning Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) to the Web in just four days using the powerful combination of asm.js and Emscripten, which enables developers to compile C++ code into JavaScript.
In addition to HTML5, “Epic Citadel” is available for iOS and Android, and it has been demonstrated for Windows RT as well. “Epic Citadel” also ships as a developer resource within Epic’s Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of UE3, and that offering extends to the custom Oculus-ready UDK released in March.
“Epic Citadel” was built with the same UE3 tools and technologies used to develop best-selling PC, console and mobile games. Features include:
· Amazing visuals. Through the latest advances in Unreal Engine 3 technology, “Epic Citadel” pushes the envelope for modern game visuals on the Web.
· Realistic reflections and animations. Environment mapping and other high-end rendering techniques produce lifelike reflections, while vertex deformation and skeletal animation bring trees and banners to life with dynamic movements.
· Global illumination. Unreal Engine 3’s built-in global illumination system, Unreal Lightmass, provides realistic lighting and shadows with minimal development resources.
· Dynamic specular lighting with texture masks. Sophisticated graphics features impart a tangible quality to cobblestone roads and vivid reflective marble surfaces, while lens flares and light coronas add dramatic emphasis when panning across light sources.
