Earlier this year, Epic Games and Mozilla showcased a demo of Epic’s popular Unreal Engine running the browser without the need for a plugin. Based on Mozilla’s Asm.js JavaScript subset and its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler, this demo was meant to showcase what developers can now do in the browser thanks to the asm.js project and WebGL for bringing 3D content to the browser. Until now, though, virtually all projects that combined these technologies were demos. Now, NomNom Games, a subsidiary of Trendy Entertainment, has launched Monster Madness, the first commercial game that uses Unreal Engine 3 and Mozilla’s technologies.
As expected, the game runs best in Firefox, which recently gained full support for asm.js, but it will also happily run in Chrome and Opera. The game, it’s worth noting, is officially in alpha, but it’s now available for anybody who wants to give it a try â€" including some multi-player elements.
Bringing Monster Madness to the browser, Mozilla says, only took about a week (though they got some technical support from Epic and Mozilla).
Asm.js and Emscripten obviously help developers port many of their C and C++ assets to JavaScript and then run them at near-native speeds. Most game development shops are heavily invested in these programming languages because that’s basically the only way they can get the performance they need.
Mozilla is clearly homing in on games as the first set of applications to bring these technologies to the mainstream. The organization, however, also says that it believes other types of content can also benefit from the performance gains that asm.js offers.
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