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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The PlayCanvas website and editor will be unavailable intermittently from 9am UTC tomorrow (Saturday 10th June) while we perform server maintenance. We will endeavor to keep downtime to a minimum but the period of downtime may be several hours. Stay informed with updates via this blog post and on our Twitter Account.

We apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Update: Maintenance is complete at 2.30pm UTC. Thanks for you patience.

Today we're excited to unveil the new code editor for all our PlayCanvas users. We've been taking your feedback since we launched Scripts 2.0 last year and we've updated the code editor to make working on scripts in PlayCanvas much easier.

Today we're excited to launch the WebVR Lab, a living project built by the PlayCanvas team to help developers learn about creating scalable and responsive WebVR applications for all devices.

Try the lab right now:

Try it in fullscreen