New in PlayCanvas Editor: Joints, Parallax Occlusion and Splat LOD
Editor 2.32 is out, and it leads with something that has been a long time coming: the Joint component. Hinges, sliders, ball joints, springs and breakable welds are now things you configure in the inspector rather than assemble from a script.
There is more to it than that. Materials get ray-marched parallax occlusion, the render component gets per-cascade shadow control, text elements can finally justify, and the Gaussian splat LOD controls have been reworked.
This is also the first of what we intend to make a regular thing. Plenty has shipped in the Editor over the past year without ever being written up, so from here on we will be posting about Editor releases far more often — shorter posts, closer to the release, instead of waiting for one big enough to justify the effort.
🔗 The Joint Component
A joint constrains two rigid bodies to each other, or constrains a single rigid body to a fixed point in world space. The component has been in the engine for years; 2.32 is the first release where you can author it entirely in the Editor.
Reach for it when you want mechanical behaviour to fall out of the simulation instead of being animated by hand: a rope bridge whose planks sag under a load, a door that swings on a hinge, a lift that slides along one axis, a ragdoll, a hanging sign that gets knocked around.
Add it from Add Component > Physics > Joint on any entity. Two prerequisites: Ammo must be imported into the project, and both referenced entities need a rigidbody component.
There are five joint types — Fixed, Ball, Hinge, Slider and 6DoF — and the inspector adapts to the one you pick:
- Every type shows Entity A, Entity B, Enable Collision and Break Impulse. Leave Entity B empty to pin Entity A to world space; leave Break Impulse empty for an unbreakable joint.
- Ball, Hinge and Slider get Enable Limits. Hinge and Slider add a Limits range once limits are on, plus Motor Speed and Max Motor Force, which are independent of the limits toggle — so a hinge can be driven as a motor whether or not it is clamped.
- Ball adds Swing Limit Y, Swing Limit Z and Twist Limit.
- 6DoF swaps in a per-axis grid of motion, limit and spring fields across linear and angular X, Y and Z — enough to build a spring, a piston or a clamped compound hinge without writing any code.
One practical note from building test scenes with it: changing Type destroys and recreates the underlying constraint and clears the broken flag, but it will not pull already-separated bodies back together. The swing and twist limits, on the other hand, push straight through to the constraint, so you can tune them live while the launch page is running.
Full reference: the Joint component docs, the Joints guide and the engine's JointComponent.
⛰️ Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Materials gain a proper Parallax panel. The old single-step height offset is still there, but there is now a ray-marched Occlusion mode that makes brickwork, cobbles and panel gaps hold up at grazing angles, where a flat normal map gives the game away.
The panel only enables once a normal map is assigned. Inside it:
- Mode — Offset for a single height-map offset, Occlusion for ray-marched parallax occlusion.
- Strength — how deep the effect reads.
- Base — the height-map value that sits at the original surface. Use
1for depth maps where white is the flat surface. - Samples — maximum height-map samples, Occlusion only. Higher is more expensive.
- Self Shadow — maximum samples used to self-shadow the relief per directional light, Occlusion only. Set it to
0to turn self-shadowing off.
Worth being clear about what this does and does not do: it is a shading trick. The mesh silhouette and the depth buffer are unchanged, so it will not round off the edge of a flat quad. Details are in the material inspector docs and the new Parallax Mapping guide.
🌓 Per-Cascade Shadow Control
The render component has a new Shadow Cascades field — a four-box mask that selects which directional-light shadow cascades receive this render component. Cascades the light does not have are ignored.
This is a budget tool. Large static geometry that only matters in the distance can skip the tight near cascade; small props that are never seen from far away can be confined to the first cascade or two, cutting the cost of the distant shadow passes.
The field sits directly below Cast Shadows and only appears when it is enabled. It pairs with the existing Cascades and Cascade Distribution fields on the light component.
One rough edge we know about: the viewport does not always throw away its cached shadow maps when you change the mask, so you may need to nudge the camera before the change appears. The launch page renders it correctly, and we are treating the viewport behaviour as a bug rather than something to work around.
See the render component docs and RenderComponent#shadowCascadeMask.
📐 Justified Text
A small one, but a long-standing gap. The element component gains Justify, which stretches wrapped lines out to both edges by widening the spaces between words. Good for body copy in a panel, a credits screen or anywhere a ragged right edge looks untidy.
It only means anything with Wrap Lines turned on, and the Editor only shows the checkbox when that is the case and Auto Width is off. Element component docs · ElementComponent#justify
🎯 Reworked Gaussian Splat LOD Controls
The gsplat component's LOD fields have been replaced. The old LOD Base Distance and LOD Multiplier are gone; in their place, LOD Range Min and LOD Range Max bound the LOD levels used to render the splat, and LOD Falloff controls how strongly detail is concentrated near the camera within the global splat budget, with 0 spreading it evenly.
The range pair is how you stop one splat from eating the whole budget, or force a hero scan to stay at full detail regardless of distance. Falloff is the shaping knob on top of it.
One thing to know before you go looking for a difference: the LOD range only bites on streamed SOG octrees, because the level is clamped to the levels the asset actually has and a single .sog or .ply has exactly one. The fields still appear on those assets, they just have nothing to choose between.
The gsplat component docs have been updated for the new fields. Splat footage above and in the release video: Trogir, Croatia by tosolini, CC BY 4.0.
🧩 Also in 2.32
A handful of smaller additions that did not need a section of their own:
- Max Lights joins the Clustered Lighting section of the Rendering settings. It caps how many clustered lights can be visible in a frame — keep it as low as your scene allows, as values above 255 push the engine onto a larger light-index texture.
- A Gaussian Splatting settings section, which was not surfaced in the panel before. It gathers the scene-wide splat knobs in one place: radial sorting, the LOD update triggers, Splat Budget, the culling and foveation thresholds and the appearance toggles. Splat Budget is the one to start with — it sets the target number of splats rendered across the whole scene, and per-component LOD Falloff then shapes how each splat spends its share of it.
- Asset Credentials in the Network settings. With it on, asset requests are sent with credentials — cookies, client certificates or HTTP authentication — which is what you need when your assets sit behind an authenticated server. The usual CORS caveat applies: the server has to allow credentials and return a specific origin rather than a wildcard.
- Client-side font generation (since 2.30.0). MSDF atlas generation moved out of the server-side conversion pipeline and into the browser, and the descriptor and atlas pages now land as separate assets you can inspect, repoint or swap for your own. The Characters field is editable, so you can widen the character set later and regenerate.
- Toolbar customization (since 2.30.3). The toolbar is no longer fixed — show, hide and reorder the buttons to match how you actually work.
- Built on PlayCanvas Engine 2.22.3.
Everything else is itemised in the 2.32.0 release notes.
💚 Open Source, Top to Bottom
The Editor frontend and the Engine underneath it are both MIT licensed and developed in the open. If something in this release is broken, missing or just awkward to use, the issue tracker and the pull request queue are the shortest routes to fixing it.
Just getting started? The User Manual walks through the Editor end to end, and the Physics documentation covers the rigid bodies and collision shapes that every joint sits on top of.
👂 Tell Us What You Break
Joints get interesting once people start pushing them past what they were designed for, so we would like to see what you do with them. If something behaves differently to how you expected, or the thing you actually needed did not make this release, say so — the Discord and the forum are where we are, and we are on X too.