Today marks a major milestone for the PlayCanvas Engine, the open-source JavaScript runtime that powers thousands of interactive graphical apps and tools on the web. We are bubbling with excitement to announce the release of version 2.0.0!
Hi everyone!
This is a different blog post to what we normally do but with some big changes coming soon, we wanted to give context and advance notice of said changes and more importantly, how they may affect you across the PlayCanvas platform.
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.
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.
We've just launched "Scripts 2.0", a complete re-design and re-implementation of the scripting system for PlayCanvas applications. Our goals were to fix an array of small irritations that had built up over using the PlayCanvas scripting for the last few years and take the opportunity to clean up the interface and simplify the creation and usage of scripts.
May is drawing to a close and it's starting to feel like summer here in London. Let's celebrate with a PlayCanvas Dev Update! We've been busy bees, so here's a rundown of the main changes.
Today we're pleased to update the engine and tools with a new Asset API. We've finessed the API to make it more intuitive and also added some extra features to make it easier for you to preload or stream in assets at any stage of your application.
This post should introduce some of the new APIs, plus give you an upgrade guide for areas of the API which have changed.
With the latest engine changes released today (v0.164.0), we're streamlining our API to make it quicker and easier for you to get started with PlayCanvas. Less API to remember, more time coding your game.
If you're working with real-time 3D, chances are that you want your scenes to look physically accurate. For many years, graphics engines have relied on a non-physical approximations without respect to energy conservation and had problems with properly decoupling lighting from the actual material properties. In recent times, huge advances have been made to formulate more accurate shading approaches as well as provide sensible material inputs, which could approximate many types of surfaces without using hacks and tweaks for each scene and lighting conditions. This is a collection of techniques and art-producing approaches often referred to as Physically Based Rendering, or PBR.
When we first started PlayCanvas (over 2,716 commits ago) WebGL was just beginning to make it's way from Chrome and Firefox Nightlies into stable releases. Fast-forward to 3 years and WebGL is everywhere, Firefox and Chrome have strong support both on desktop and on mobile. And just this week the final player Apple have joined us with WebGL support for both Safari and iOS.
Today, we have some more great news for WebGL fans, game developers and web developers alike.
PlayCanvas Engine is now open source.