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New in PlayCanvas Editor: Joints, Parallax Occlusion and Splat LOD

· 9 min read
Kris Bamrah
Software Engineer

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.

PlayCanvas Editor Frontend is now Open Source

· 3 min read
Kris Bamrah
Software Engineer

Today, we are thrilled to announce the open sourcing of the PlayCanvas Editor Frontend!

The PlayCanvas Editor is a powerful visual editing environment for building WebGL, WebGPU, and WebXR applications. It has been the cornerstone of countless incredible projects, many of which you can explore on the PlayCanvas website. While the PlayCanvas Engine has always been open source, the Editor Frontend, a key component of the PlayCanvas ecosystem, has not. That changes today!

Open Source

The PlayCanvas Editor Frontend is open-sourced under an MIT license on GitHub

Introducing ESM Scripts in PlayCanvas

· 3 min read
Mark Lundin
Software Engineer

We’re excited to announce a major step forward for PlayCanvas: ESM Scripts are now supported — and officially the recommended way to write scripts in your PlayCanvas projects.

Back in 2016, we introduced what we now call Classic Scripts. At the time, this represented the state of the art in JavaScript. But things have evolved rapidly since then, and developers today expect modern tooling, clearer patterns, and better integration with the broader JavaScript ecosystem.

If you’ve ever struggled with managing classic scripts, wondered why your auto-complete didn’t work, or wished you could reuse code across projects more easily — this is for you.

ESM (ECMAScript Modules) brings modern JavaScript development to the heart of PlayCanvas. It’s faster to get started, easier to scale your project, and way more fun to work with. No more hidden globals. No more messy script loading order. Just well-structured, maintainable, and modular code — exactly how modern web development should be.

Announcing the New PlayCanvas Asset Store

· 4 min read

The PlayCanvas Asset Store is the first place that users tend to go to find content for their projects. This is especially true for new users who want to get started as quickly as possible. Up until now, the Store has not been particularly easy to use and the content has not changed in quite a long time. In short, a complete overhaul and refresh has been long overdue. So today, we are incredibly excited to announce a major upgrade for the PlayCanvas Asset Store!

First up, check out a little example of building a city scene using content taken from the Asset Store. A skybox, a pack of 3D city block meshes and a camera control script are imported and the city is built via drag and drop. And not one single line of code is needed!

Now, let's examine some of the key highlights that make the new Asset Store so special.

glTF 2.0 Import Arrives in the PlayCanvas Editor

· 4 min read

We are excited to announce a major update for the PlayCanvas Editor: glTF 2.0 import. This new feature allows users to easily import and use 3D models created in other applications such as Blender and SketchUp, as well as from digital asset stores like Sketchfab, directly into the PlayCanvas Editor.

Model by Loïc Norgeot and mosquito scan by Geoffrey Marchal for Sketchfab licensed under CC BY 4.0
Author: Sketchfab License: CC-BY-4.0 Source: Mosquito in Amber