Will Eastcott is an entrepreneur and veteran technologist of the games industry with experience at EA, Sony, and Activision. He has been credited in many AAA game franchises such as GTA, Call of Duty and Max Payne. He is best known for co-founding PlayCanvas, the web graphics creation platform. As CEO, he has championed the company's mission to make graphical web app development more accessible and collaborative through open-source technologies and cloud-based tools.
View all authorsHappy New Year to you all!
In 2021, we marked the 10th anniversary of PlayCanvas. In that time, we have seen WebGL become the world's standard for web graphics, implemented into every major web browser. And we have done our part to help make WebGL content creation both easy and fun!
2021 was definitely our most productive year yet. The platform has continued to evolve, delivering a host of new features and performance improvements.
PlayCanvas has a rich JavaScript API that allows you to build just about any type of interactive content imaginable - games, playable ads, product configurators, AR, VR and more! But learning a new API can be tough. Reading API reference documentation is all well and good, but many people prefer to learn by experimentation. And by examining the code of real world examples. This led the PlayCanvas team to build a new application: the Engine Examples Browser.
Way back in 2014, PlayCanvas was the first WebGL Engine to integrate PBR (Physically Based Rendering). To mark the event, we built the Star-Lord tech demo:
Back in October, we launched PCUI, an easy to use framework for building web-based tools. It already powers the PlayCanvas Editor and glTF Viewer applications.
Today, we're excited to announce our next major release for the library: PCUI 1.1.0. Check out the release notes for the details. But let's take a look at some of the highlights.
Today, PlayCanvas is launching PCUI: a new, open source front-end framework for the web.
Today, the PlayCanvas team is excited to announce the release of a brand new browser-based glTF viewer application.
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