Will Eastcott

It's been another busy week for the PlayCanvas team. Here's a quick run down of the coolness we've deployed for you!

At GDC 2015, ARM and PlayCanvas unveiled the Seemore WebGL demo. If you haven’t seen it yet, it takes WebGL graphics to a whole new level.

CLICK HERE TO LAUNCH SEEMORE

PlayCanvas is passionate about education and many universities throughout the world are already using PlayCanvas to teach videogame development skills. One such school is ENTI, which is attached to the University of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.

GDC is here again. What better time to announce our newest demo, built to show the awesome power of the ARM Mali family of GPUs. It's called Seemore, and it showcases the next evolutionary step in PlayCanvas' Physically Based Rendering (PBR) technology.

Click the fullscreen button top right for the best experience.

If you're working with real-time 3D, chances are that you want your scenes to look physically accurate. For many years, graphics engines have relied on a non-physical approximations without respect to energy conservation and had problems with properly decoupling lighting from the actual material properties. In recent times, huge advances have been made to formulate more accurate shading approaches as well as provide sensible material inputs, which could approximate many types of surfaces without using hacks and tweaks for each scene and lighting conditions. This is a collection of techniques and art-producing approaches often referred to as Physically Based Rendering, or PBR.

Last Thursday, Intel staged one heck of an awesome event in London: 'The Buzz Workshop: Be Mobile'. It was essentially a mini-conference that consisted of talks given by industry experts, a panel and even an indie game pitch event.

Another exciting day at PlayCanvas Towers! PlayCanvas and Tizen have formerly announced a partnership, with PlayCanvas joining the Tizen Association Partner Program. So what does all this mean? Let's start with a little bit about Tizen.

In July 2011, Apple released Safari 5.1 bringing WebGL to OS X users. WebGL advocates the world over rejoiced - except there was a catch. WebGL was disabled by default, hidden behind a flag buried deep within Safari's preferences panel. The general expectation was that a switch to 'on by default' could not be far behind. Almost 3 years on, it seems this view was seriously misjudged.

This week, thousands of indie developers are making their way to Malmö, Sweden for a very special conference. That's right folks - Nordic Game is here again!

Making a video game in 48 hours is tough. In fact, it's one of the most gruelling mental challenges you can face. But every 4 months, thousands of die hard game developers enter Ludum Dare, a game jam of epic proportions. And they're not doing it for the prizes (there aren't any) or even the glory. They're doing it to give the gift of a game. And when it's a game you have created yourself, it's a very personal and powerful gift.