Author: dave

by dave on News

Version Control in PlayCanvas

One of our most requested features has always been for more advanced version control features. We’re very pleased to announce that from today we now have built in version control throughout the PlayCanvas Editor. Integrated support for branches, merging and checkpoints brings a host of new workflow options for your team and we’re confident that it’s going to be a huge productivity multiplier for your HTML5 games and 3D applications.

How does it work?

Checkpoints

Checkpoints take a snapshot of your project at a moment in time. This lets you restore previous versions or just see a timeline of what changes are being made by each member of your team.

Branches

Like other version control systems with PlayCanvas you can create independent lines of development by creating branches. Branches let you or your team work on changes and features that don’t affect your main product development.

 

Merging

Once you’ve finished work in your branch, you’ll want to merge you branch back into your production development. We’ve got a sophisticated merging interface that let’s you merge your code, scenes and assets and resolve any conflicting changes in your scenes and code.

We’ve been testing the version control features over the last few months and we know you’re going to love them. Read more about how you can use branches in your project in our developer docs.

What’s next?

We know that our users have specific needs and want to customize their workflows. With branches now available to isolate development, we’ve unlocked a host of new opportunities that you can try via our API. For starters it’s now possible to synchronize your script assets from your PlayCanvas branch into an external source control system like Github. Try this yourself via our Asset REST API, but we’ll be building on these features in the future.

by dave on Features, News

New Feature: 2D Sprites and 9-slicing

PlayCanvas is one of the most popular ways to build 3D interactive web content today. But before 3D graphics was a thing, there was 2D graphics!

Today we’re excited to launch the first part of our 2D graphics support. Great for building classic 2D games.

There are 5 great new features which will help you build 2D games using PlayCanvas.

Texture Atlas Asset

 

The new Texture Atlas asset is an enhanced texture asset which includes additional frame data for splitting your texture into multiple Sprites.

Sprite Asset

The Sprite Asset is a set of frames from a texture atlas. This can be a single button or a complete flip-book style animation.

Sprite Component

The Sprite Component is a new Component that you can add to your Entities. The Sprite Component let’s you play back sprite animation clips and build up your new 2D world.

Sprite Editor

The Sprite Editor is a new tool inside the PlayCanvas Editor to create and edit Texture Atlases. The Sprite Editor lets you quickly define frame regions in your texture and it’s also used to define the 9-slicing region.

9-Slicing

9-Slicing is a very useful technique for creating scalable user interface elements from 2D textures. Using the Sprite Editor to define a border on an image, you can now use Sprites in your Element components to build your UIs. Watch this space for more User Interface features coming soon.

All these features are available today inside the PlayCanvas Editor. Take a look at the documentation and let us know what you think on the forum.

Prehistoric graphics by Pixel-boy

by dave on Features

Introducing Element & Screen Components

Building user interfaces in graphical applications provides a unique challenge. Today we’re pleased to launch two new components to help you build user interfaces inside your WebGL application.

UI demo

From today you’ll find two new components available in the PlayCanvas Editor.

Screen Component

The screen component is the container for your 2D objects. This component acts a parent to all the 2D elements you are adding and defines resolution and resize behavior.

Element Component

The element component renders text and images into your screen. These can form the building blocks of more complex user interface features like buttons, or just use them to display content in 2D.

The element component also features useful layout features like anchoring and pivot points and the Group Element.

Supporting text in PlayCanvas is trivial now. Simply drag and drop a TTF font file from your computer into the asset panel and we’ll convert it into our special multi-channel signed distance field font asset which means that text can be scaled and render an almost any size and remain crisp and readable.

Learning more

Of course, we have documentation and tutorials to help you get started. Feel free to let us know what you think on the forum.