HTML5

App Developers Can Preview HTML5 and Maxwell GPU Games Built with Epic's Unreal Engine 4

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Mozilla and NVIDIA are working with the team at Epic Games to release two Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) projects that show the flexibility of the game development engine.

Unreal Engine Strategy Game Demo for HTML5

Hosted at Mozilla Demo Studio as part of Firefox’s 10th anniversary feature, Epic Games’ tower defense game sample is a showcase for high-performance 3D content running in the browser. The demo was ported utilizing Emscripten, a tool that helps developers bring fully native applications to the web by compiling them to asm.js, a highly optimizable subset of JavaScript.

UE4’s WebGL pipeline, as with all the platforms UE4 supports, is included at no additional cost to developers. UE4 is available for $19 at on the epic site, and it’s free for students and schools.

NVIDIA Apollo Demo for Maxwell GPUs

Conspiracy theories surrounding the Apollo 11 lunar landing can now be laid to rest thanks to NVIDIA’s UE4-powered Apollo demo, which is now available for download.

Powered by UE4 and Maxwell, the demo shows how light from the moon’s surface – and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s space suit – illuminated Aldrin, thereby proving the authenticity of photos taken on that historic day.

Using VXGI, the Apollo demo reconstructs the way light moved around the Apollo 11 landing site. VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination) shows the way light bounces from one object to another in real time. To do that, VXGI breaks a scene’s geometry into many thousands of tiny boxes called “voxels,” or 3D pixels.

Those who have the new Maxwell-based GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards are encouraged to download the demo. View the scene with direct and indirect lighting; toggle on Armstrong to see how his spacesuit affects the play of light; shift the position of the sun or the camera; and adjust the camera exposure.