obligatory meme:

"So, Mozilla & Epic heard you liked games on the internet... So they put a AAA game engine in your browser..."

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMzNzc

The coolest part... it only took them 4 days to port and it will run on any HTML 5 compatible browser.

Very cool. Thoughts?

Still,it won't be used too soon for games.To play a game like that inbrowser one will need great internet connection if not perfect.

it will run on any HTML 5 compatible browser.

The BananaBread game demo doesn't work on my PC, despite having latest drivers and latest Chrome/Firefox.

The demo at unigine.com shows a scene with no dynamic shadows. It's impressive how you can make a scene look good with baked shadows, but from technology point of view, not very interesting.

Still,it won't be used too soon for games.To play a game like that inbrowser one will need great internet connection if not perfect.

I'm not an expert, but can this mean it can be centralized from a local server. For example a server containing one game allow all 40 PC connected to it play the game in the browser too? Good for selling games to Cyber Cafes. Or something.

it will run on any HTML 5 compatible browser.

The BananaBread game demo doesn't work on my PC, despite having latest drivers and latest Chrome/Firefox.

The demo at unigine.com shows a scene with no dynamic shadows. It's impressive how you can make a scene look good with baked shadows, but from technology point of view, not very interesting.

Well, the BananaBread demo was just a concept unrelated to the article other than mention by Mozilla and Unigine isn't related at all...

Other than that, I dunno why those demos didn't work for you, i just ran it in Chrome 25.0.1364.160 and FireFox 19.0.2 with no issues.

will run on any HTML 5 compatible browser

No, it won't. For one, WebGL is not part of HTML 5. For two, HTML 5 is no standard as of yet. For three, IE10 supports HTML 5 quite good, but won't play it.

For four, some browser do support it, but have it disabled by default.

HTML has really gone down the gutter. I don't need no secondary OS in my real OS. Why have the power of 10 years ago today, when I had it ten years ago?

Also, how's audio done if HTML 5 support for it is a complete disaster?

It is interesting from a technical point of view though.

html5 is a big fat joke maintained only by the fact that you cant install a plug-in on an ipad. (how this isn't anti-competitive is a mystery to me)

Why faf about with javascript when you could just have a plugin which targets your cpu and have a virtual machine. Oh I know, Microsoft did that (Silverlight) and lets not do anything Microsoft thought up because that might give them credibility.

There is a very lame argument that plugins suck because you have to install them. Last I checked you have to install/update browsers to get the latest html5 features. Html5 is a plugin the same as flash and Silverlight, the only difference is html5 comes prebaked into the browsers because of w3c and their standards.

All browsers are currently a joke from a tech perspective. Tech is actually going backwards since the ipad forced flash/Silverlight out of the market. There is no more competition from technology vendors, just html5 and its outdated concepts. Competition between DirectX and OpenGL actually drove innovation forward.

A few years ago there was a demo of quake 2 in the browser. I said the same thing then, we are forcing ourselves down a tough path, the last thing any decent computer programmer should be doing. We should be using the best tools for the job, in or out of browsers.

Anyway, doesn't Unreal Engine 3 already work in browsers if you use Unity3d?

Yes there's a ton of little details to work out, and certainly we need to get to a place where all of the browsers have good support for HTML5, Including WebGL, and some form of Audio--likely to be WebAudio.

But I actually think its future for games and for applications in general are both more certain and nearer than many give it credit for. I don't know how many of you looked at the related slides, but the big take away from them was that they were able to get runtime performance to be just twice as slow as native using emscriptem and asm.js. That's a game-changer, because its no longer a game of an order of magnitude or more. Performance isn't 10 years behind, its more like 3 years now.

Now, I don't think that we'll ever get closer than say, 1.25x slower than native, even 1.5x is going to be a hard, but even at today's 2x you can say that native-speed is in sight, and that popular VMs like the CLR and Java are within spitting distance.

The network is an issue, but CDNs push the problem closer to the user than you might think, and HTML5 allows resources to be cached on the client, which is tantamount to installing the game or app locally. Done well, an web-based game using these technologies well could have you up and playing in just a few minutes as it continues to pull down other resources ahead of when you need them.

it will run on any HTML 5 compatible browser.

The BananaBread game demo doesn't work on my PC, despite having latest drivers and latest Chrome/Firefox.

The demo at unigine.com shows a scene with no dynamic shadows. It's impressive how you can make a scene look good with baked shadows, but from technology point of view, not very interesting.

Works for me Win7, 4-core Athlon, FF 19, 5GB-RAM.

html5 is a big fat joke maintained only by the fact that you cant install a plug-in on an ipad. (how this isn't anti-competitive is a mystery to me) ... Html5 is a plugin the same as flash and Silverlight, the only difference is html5 comes prebaked into the browsers because of w3c and their standards.

I agree it's annoying that HTML5 hasn't yet filled the job done by things like Flash, but I think it is a better way of doing things - or at least, could be if the support existed. For things like Flash, the problem is that other people can't write their own plugins to support other platforms. Worse, some plugins may be specific to the application (e.g., I think Quake Live does it this way?) - so the problem is that even though it works in a web browser, it's not actually any more portable than a native application anyway.

Does IOS not support HTML5? I'm not sure what plug-in you refer to, or what the anti-competitive is?

Tech is actually going backwards since the ipad forced flash/Silverlight out of the market.

Note, I wouldn't say they forced it out the market. But I do agree things have gone backwards.

In some cases, sites may have switched from using Flash, but often they then just replace that with native exes, in some cases only for the minority of Apple users. In other cases, the Flash sites are still around (either for non-mobile users, or provided as the "smartphone app" for all the platforms that support Flash), and Flash has only disappeared for Apple users, and we haven't seen it replaced with any kind of new open standard. As much as Flash was bad, it still did a job, and switching to native exes that only run on some platforms is far worse a solution than Flash was.