Will Eastcott

Since 2011, the PlayCanvas engine sourcebase has adhered strictly to the ES5 JavaScript specification. Since then, the JavaScript language and the surrounding tools ecosystem has moved on considerably. But PlayCanvas has steadfastly stuck to ES5. Why? Internet Explorer 11.

IE11 was released on October 17, 2013. But even today, StatCounter reports that IE11 has 2.43% of the global desktop browser market. Since PlayCanvas content is viewed by 100s of millions of end users, this is a pretty big deal.

In the early days of PlayCanvas, we published a game called TANX, an online multiplayer tank battle game.

The PlayCanvas Editor has been around since 2011. Way back then, it was called the PlayCanvas Designer. It was built on Sencha's ExtJS front end framework and looked like this:

Are you shipping your PlayCanvas app or game in just one language? You may be preventing international users from enjoying it! Today, we are happy to announce the arrival of a localization system built right into the PlayCanvas Editor!

PlayCanvas-powered Bitmoji Party localized into English, Spanish and French

Cambridge/Santa Monica, August 1 2019 - Arm and PlayCanvas are announcing the open sourcing of the renowned Seemore WebGL demo. First published in 2016, the graphical technical demo has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to deliver even more incredible performance and visuals. With it, developers are empowered to build their projects in the most optimized way, as well as using it to incorporate some of its performant features and components into their own projects.

Iterating on your PlayCanvas game just got a whole lot faster!

When you launch a scene from the PlayCanvas Editor, a set of assets has to be loaded. Non-script assets are loaded from the browser's memory cache. However, script assets each generate a round trip request to the server. For projects with a lot of scripts, the load time can be long and your ability to iterate is going to suffer.

Today, we're pleased to announce that we have deployed an update that introduces a lightning fast build step when you launch your scene that concatenates scripts into a single file. This means that only one HTTP request is made for scripts regardless of how many you have.

PlayCanvas was born 7 years ago, way back on 9th May 2011. In the early days, we were essentially prototyping, seeing what this amazing new WebGL API could do. By October 2011, we set up a source code repository and committed our first engine prototype. Right at the beginning, we adopted semantic versioning for naming our releases. Our initial commit generated engine v0.10.0. From that point onwards, we adopted a rapid release cadence, often publishing more than one release a week. The months and years passed, our team grew and feature after feature was integrated into the codebase. But through all that time, we never incremented the major version number. Why? Well, there were several reasons.

Today, Adobe announced that it is to kill Flash by 2020.

Back in early 2011, we foresaw this event and started work on PlayCanvas. We knew that Flash would still be around for some years, but we also knew that building any replacement for content creators would be a titanic task. Over six years later, PlayCanvas has established itself as the go-to toolset for building WebGL-content. The browser-based Editor application is lightweight yet exceptionally powerful. The apps produced are super-lightweight and perform great even on older mobile devices. And our modern, cloud-based approach enables developers to collaborate and iterate like never before.

Today is a huge milestone for real-time graphics on the web. Mozilla has launched Firefox 51, the first browser to bring WebGL 2 to the masses. WebGL has been around since 2011, the year when PlayCanvas was founded. 6 years on, the open standard for web graphics has taken a huge leap forwards, exposing far more GPU capabilities to developers, making for ever richer, more beautiful experiences.

To mark the launch of WebGL 2, Mozilla and PlayCanvas have teamed up to build 'After the Flood'.

Farewell, 2016! It seems that WebGL was everywhere last year, spreading across every corner of the web. And this added up to PlayCanvas’ best year yet!