Mozilla is Building a 3D Gaming Engine

Mozilla's new game engine is part of Paladin, a project by the Mozilla Labs community established to create the best gaming technology available for the open web.

ZoomMozilla is reportedly working on a 3D gaming engine called Gladius as part of its new Paladin project to push 3D gaming into the browser. The team is currently building a game based on the new engine called RescueFox which supposedly works in recent releases of Firefox --  it wouldn't work in version 8 as of this writing. Cursory testing also suggests that it works in Chrome for the Mac, although performance is slower and there is no sound, Mozilla said.

"Paladin sits at the intersection of 3D gaming, JavaScript framework and library development, and the browser," Mozilla explains. "We're tied into the bits of the web that are up-and-coming, and are working to weaponize them for gaming. Where the web is missing critical gaming support, we aim to fill those gaps by adding new browser APIs, enhancing existing ones, and building technologies on top of the web."

According to Mozilla, RescueFox was developed to make sure that the Gladius gaming engine was really going to be suitable for third-party development. Initially CJ Cliffe started by doing a ton of work directly against CubicVR.js, a 3D engine used to build the No Comply and Flight of the Navigator demos.  Alan Kligman and Bobby Richter started porting chunks of it to the higher-level Gladius APIs. Dan Mosedale started working with some of the input APIs, the timer, and finding visual assets to use.

Eventually they discovered that the higher-level Gladius APIs were actually making the game more complex to build rather than easier, so the team temporarily went with lower-level APIs and did just enough work to make it basically playable. The higher-level Gladius APIs needed some refactoring, the team concluded.

"We think we’ve learned most of what we can from RescueFox and don’t intend to drive it forward any further at this point (though that shouldn’t stop anyone who feels inclined to fork it)," Mosedale said. "But we’ll be prototyping another microgame soon once the Gladius refactoring is a bit further along, and we’ll be very interested in having folks help out there."