Epic wants Unreal Samaritan demo running in Flash

Epic brought its latest Flash-based Unreal Engine demos to GDC, and has some seriously lofty goals for the browser tech.

Kotaku reports Epic closed its flash presentation with a reference to the amazing next-generation tech demo it showed last year, Samaritan.

"Our longterm goal is to be able to do Samaritan in Flash," Mark Rein said.

This goal may not be as immodest as it seems; when Samritan was shown last year it required three Nvidia GTX 580 graphics cards, but the upcoming Nvidia Kepler can handle it on its own.

VentureBeat reports the tech demos require an upcoming release of Flash, version 11.2, which runs in all browsers - Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari were named. The new tech makes use of a PC's own graphics hardware rather than simply stressing the processor.

“It works for games of all sizes, small, medium or large. This is the year when we reach every platform," Rein said.

The company also showed off Unreal Tournament III running in a browser at full quality, thanks to Unreal Engine's improved Flash support, as well as Dungeon Defenders and Epic Citadel.

"This isn't your father's Farmville, this is immersive, 3D, beautiful environments," Rein said.

Unreal Engine 4 was not shown publicly but may be revealed later this year on new hardware; Rein predicted the next generation of console games will be powered by Unreal 4.