Unity game engine heading to the browser without plug-ins

Mozilla and Unity today announced that Unity 5, to be released later this year, will include an early access preview of a version of the 3D engine that supports WebGL and asm.js, enabling plug-in-free access to the Web.

The Unity game engine has found huge success among game developers as it can target Windows, iOS, Android, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and more. Unity games can also be deployed on the Web, but this function currently uses a browser plug-in, the Unity Web Player. The early access will remove the need for the plug-in. Initially, it will only support desktop Firefox and desktop Chrome, due to their performance and (in Firefox's case) explicit support for the high performance asm.js subset.

While the WebGL/asm.js version of the Unity engine is not as fast as the plug-in version, the companies say that it's still good enough to hit 60 frames per second in a range of games. Unity is looking for feedback from developers during this early access preview to refine and improve the engine prior to producing a final version. The generated code takes advantage of some of the new browser APIs that Mozilla is pushing, such as support for gamepads.

Mozilla first approached Unity to investigate the possibility of porting its engine to Web technologies two years ago. Unity has seen considerable developer interest in a WebGL version of its engine, so the two companies worked together to make it happen. Unity's long-term goal is to enable portable, safe code that will run on any of its supported platforms, using Unity's C# scripting. The native Web support converts that C# to C++ code and then produces asm.js using the Emscripten compiler.