This week, a number of Mozillians attended the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to demonstrate how the Web is a competitive platform for gaming and game development.

We’ve worked very hard over the past couple of months on technologies used to speed up the Web for game development, including asm.js, a JavaScript optimization technology and pure-JS-subset target language for compilers; Emscripten, a C++ to JavaScript compiler; and OdinMonkey, the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine’s compiler for asm.js source.

On Wednesday, we were happy to announce that we’ve teamed up with Epic Games to combine these technologies to bring Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 to the Web.

This is significant because it demonstrates to everyone that game developers and publishers can now take advantage of the reach and scale of the Web without the additional user acquisition friction and even higher costs (infinite on iOS :-P) associated with third-party plugins. These technology advancements also mean improved performance and the ability to port lots of games to the Web on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. (Note well that asm.js code runs pretty fast on modern browsers, and super-fast when optimized as by OdinMonkey.)

We’ve also developed a new demo for Banana Bread that includes multi-player support and integrates parts of WebRTC for the data channel.

Big thanks to everyone on the gaming team and supporters throughout the Mozilla project for all the hard work to make this possible. I must single out Martin Best, Dave Herman, Vladimir Vukićević (WebGL creator!), Luke Wagner, and Alon Zakai (AKA @kripken).

I was personally thrilled to meet Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games, for breakfast before GDC Thursday. I’d been aware of Tim since his invited talk at POPL 2006. Tim and I were on very much the same page on many things, including JS’s ascendance as a safe target assembly-like language for C++ via asm.js and beyond.

/be

P.S. I’d like to thank Luke Wagner for taking on module ownership of SpiderMonkey, as Dave Mandelin has handed the baton on.

P.P.S. Hot rumor: WebGL in IE11? Source, judge for yourself. I have hopes.

UPDATE: withinwindows.com says WebGL is coming, disabled by default so far, and (look for “UPDATE3” run together at the original source) with a different shader language, IESL based on HLSL, from GLSL ES.

2nd UPDATE: From “UPDATE4” at François Remy’s blog post, GLSL is the default and you set a registry flag to get HLSL. Cool!

P.P.P.S. asm.js support in V8 bug on file.