5 posts tagged with "partnership"

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.

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EXPLORE PROJECT

“I’m so excited to be relaunching the Seemore demo. Open sourcing it in partnership with Arm will bring a host of benefits to the WebGL development community,” said Will Eastcott, CEO of PlayCanvas. “It’s an incredible learning resource that provides many clean, easy to follow examples of some very advanced graphical techniques. Sharing this project publicly is going to help move web graphics forwards for everybody.”

“PlayCanvas and Arm have always strived to push the boundaries of graphics and the original demo is a testament to that,” said Pablo Fraile, Director of Developer Ecosystems at Arm. “It’s encouraging to see how PlayCanvas have advanced mobile web rendering performance since the original demo. This re-release provides a unique resource into graphics for the mobile web that is both easy to follow and incorporate into your own projects.”

The Seemore demo was originally created as a graphical showcase for the mobile browser and takes full advantage of Arm Mali GPUs. It has been upgraded to utilize the full capabilities of WebGL 2, the latest iteration of the web graphics API. Some of the main features of the demo include:

• Physical shading with image based lighting and box-projected cube maps.
• Stunning refraction effects.
• HDR lightmaps.
• Interpolated pre-baked shadow maps as a fast substitute for real time shadow-mapping.
• ETC2 texture compression to ensure that highly detailed textures occupy only a small amount of system memory.
• Draw call batching.
• Asynchronous streaming of assets to ensure the demo loads in mere seconds (approximately 5x faster than the original version).
• Fully GPU-driven mesh animation.

Today is a huge milestone for real-time graphics on the web. Mozilla has launched Firefox 51, the first browser to bring WebGL 2 to the masses. WebGL has been around since 2011, the year when PlayCanvas was founded. 6 years on, the open standard for web graphics has taken a huge leap forwards, exposing far more GPU capabilities to developers, making for ever richer, more beautiful experiences.

To mark the launch of WebGL 2, Mozilla and PlayCanvas have teamed up to build 'After the Flood'.

EXPERIENCE 'AFTER THE FLOOD' NOW

'After the Flood' illustrates many of the key, new aspects of WebGL 2.

• Transform feedback: to animate leaf particles on the GPU.
• 3D Textures: used to create procedural clouds.
• HDR rendering with MSAA: for correct blending of antialiased HDR surfaces.
• Hardware PCF: for better shadow filtering at a lower cost.
• Alpha to coverage: to render antialiased foliage.
• ...and much more.

So how was all of this done? As you know, PlayCanvas is an open source game engine. All of the work to integrate WebGL 2 into the engine can be found on GitHub.

Other key demo features are:

• Compressed textures: DXT, PVR and ETC1 are used to reduce VRAM usage.
• Asynchronous asset streaming: to get the demo loading faster.
• Runtime lightmap baking: to generate realistic shadows that render fast.
• Procedural water ripples
• Planar mirrors

As you can see, PlayCanvas is all about squeezing the full potential from the browser. PlayCanvas apps, like 'After the Flood', look beautiful, load fast and perform great.

So what's next? First, we will refactor and merge our WebGL 2 work into PlayCanvas' mainline codebase. Then we will enable 'After the Flood' on mobile. And finally, we will make the demo project public so you can see exactly how we made it:

Want to get creative with WebGL yourself?  Why not get started with PlayCanvas today?

PlayCanvas is proud to announce that browser-gaming giant Miniclip has published their first PlayCanvas-powered game: Virtual Voodoo.

Virtual Voodoo is designed to get you in the mood for a spooky Halloween. Make the poor Voodoo doll's life a misery with a dastardly selection of spells, curses and implements of pain! You can even customize the doll with different clothing and accessories.

Jamie Cason, Executive Producer at Miniclip said:

We’re really excited by PlayCanvas technology and the promise that it holds for the future of Open Web Games. It is currently the best toolchain and engine for WebGL that we’ve seen and Virtual Voodoo represents the first of, what we hope to be, a series of successful PlayCanvas-powered Miniclip titles.

Using PlayCanvas to create new games is a no-brainer for Miniclip. Browser plugins are gradually being phased out of the browser ecosystem and HTML5/WebGL are the technologies browser game developers are moving to. PlayCanvas is the only professional IDE for building lightweight HTML5/WebGL games that have incredibly short load times. Virtual Voodoo is playable after loading only 4MB and loads in seconds. This means more players end up playing the game and Miniclip achieves better retention.

Look out for more PlayCanvas-games from Miniclip in the future. But for now, why not embrace your dark side and PLAY VIRTUAL VOOODOO NOW!

Big news coming in February. Our monthly Game Jam PLAYHACK is back. This time we've partnered with games publisher Playjam to offer rewards for the best games you create.

Playjam are offering big cash prizes for the winners of the new PLAYHACK, plus the opportunity to be published and feature in their upcoming mobile platform for HTML5 games.

PLAYHACK will kick-off on the 1st February and run for 6 weeks. So warm up your coding fingers and get yourself familiar with all the new PlayCanvas goodies. Here's a hint, mobile games are popular these days...

More info soon, it's going to be a big one!

GO WARM UP WITH PLAYCANVAS

Another exciting day at PlayCanvas Towers! PlayCanvas and Tizen have formerly announced a partnership, with PlayCanvas joining the Tizen Association Partner Program. So what does all this mean? Let's start with a little bit about Tizen.

Tizen is an open source project managed by the Linux Foundation. The goal of the project is to build and support a cross-architecture, open source software platform that spans multiple device segments, including smartphone, tablet, Smart TV, appliances, netbook and in-vehicle infotainment systems. The Tizen Association is an industry consortium of operators, device manufacturers and their suppliers, independent software developers and mobile application developers.

Ryoichi Sugimura, a Tizen Association Board Member from NTT DOCOMO, kindly gave us a very warm welcome to the Tizen family today: “I am delighted to welcome PlayCanvas to our ever-growing membership. Their contribution will support the development of the Tizen OS and ecosystem, and further drive Tizen’s vision of building and supporting a cross-architecture, open source software platform that spans across multiple device segments.”

More specifically, you can now count Tizen as an officially supported target for your PlayCanvas games. Tizen has absolutely awesome HTML5 and WebGL support so you can be sure performance will be stellar and your games will translate with minimal fuss. In the coming days, we will add a Tizen publishing guide to our documentation. In the meantime, if you want to get started with the platform, why not download Tizen Studio.

We want to hear about your experiences getting your PlayCanvas creations running on Tizen. So head to the forums and tell us all about it!