Epic Citadel comes to HTML5

The Unreal Engine 3 tech demo Epic Citadel has been released via HTML5 for the web.

Produced as a result of a partnership between Epic Games and Mozilla revealed at GDC 13, the demo runs without the need of any additional plug-ins or web players.

The web app works through "standards-based" technologies like HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript – the bread and butter of the open-source Firefox browser Mozilla is best known for.

Epic Citadel made its first appearance on iOS and is also available on Android. It has also been shown working on Windows RT.

The teams at Mozilla and Epic claim it only took them four days to get the Unreal Engine running on the Web making use of asm.js and Emscripten, which translates C++ into JavaScript.

“With Mozilla’s latest innovations in JavaScript, game developers and publishers can now take advantage of fast performance that rivals native while leveraging scale of the Web, without the additional costs associated with third-party plugins," reads a recent Mozilla blog post.

"This allows them to distribute visually stunning and performance intensive games to billions of people more easily and cost effectively than before."