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PlayCanvas, the Web-first game engine
- apsdsm 6y agoFor what it’s worth, when I was working at a mobile game studio, we looked at this as an engine for a project. At the time we decided not to go with it since all your code needs to live on their server and there’s no easy local dev environment. Not sure what the state of play for this product is now, but at the time we considered it too risky a proposition (what if they go out of business tomorrow?) and too limiting for the cost they were asking to use their platform.
- wiradikusuma 6y agowhat did you guys end up using?
- hirako2000 6y agoI also went down that route and opted for three.js The downside is no decent game engine nor IDE, you end up writing your own engine and tooling.
- apsdsm 6y agoSame cons that we came up with too. Which means it’s that’s much harder for anyone who isn’t a developer to make contributions to things like level design.
- apsdsm 6y agoI left the company before that decision really formalized itself but I think the lead dev was leaning towards using Phaser. I believe they’re using that now at least. We had been using Unity for a long time but when the company decided pivot to HTML, we kept running into performance issues for for web (which left the Unity developer we had hired in a pretty awkward position).
- ajdegol 6y agoI think the engine is open source; but the real appeal is using the real time collab online tool, which is proprietary and had the drawbacks you mention.
- rewq4321 6y agoThe engine absolutely is open source, and there are no clauses pertaining to where the code must be hosted. Their particular IDE may be closed-source, but the engine is not tied to it. IIRC playcanvas was started by ex-mozilla people. I played around with the engine a while ago and was quite impressed by the all-in-one-ness of it.
- ovenchips 6y agoPlayCanvas was started by ex-EA/Activision/Sony devs. But Mozilla partnered with PlayCanvas to open source the engine and later launch Firefox's WebGL 2 support with the After the Flood demo: http://aftertheflood.playcanvas.com/ http://aftertheflood.playcanvas.com/
- rewq4321 6y agoAhh, thank you for the correction.
- redka 6y agoIt's certainly not super obvious to setup but there are ways to use PlayCanvas with local setup[1]. I have Redirector[2] rules in my browser and that basically handles it. So with some tinkering you can have hot module replacement and front-end libraries integrated for a very smooth and web-dev-y modern workflow. [1] https://github.com/thisredone/coffeescript-playcanvas-template https://github.com/thisredone/coffeescript-playcanvas-templa... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenflpmgnfapjedencafcfakcekcd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...
- ovenchips 6y agoI recommend checking out the newly released playcanvas-sync tools which let you map your PlayCanvas project's assets to your local machine's file system: https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync Also, last month, the plans received a major upgrade: https://blog.playcanvas.com/plan-updates-more-storage-more-features-same-price/ https://blog.playcanvas.com/plan-updates-more-storage-more-f...
- mentos 6y agoI’m a game dev looking for something like PlayCanvas can you recommend alternatives? What did your studio end up going with?
- apsdsm 6y agoI think they ended up using Phaser. I left before they actually released a game with that new stack. As mentioned below the cons are that you will need to invest more in making your tooling and it’s way harder for anyone whose not a programmer to use it. The pros were that it was very easy to work with, HTML first, and had a long enough track record to have ironed out a lot of common developer problems. I recall our unity engineer quite liked Defold, which had an integrated builder tool, but for some reason the lead dev didn’t want to go with it. I don’t want to be throwing shade on Play Canvas though, it’s possible if we did the same assessment today we would have gone with that engine.
- mrmaxm 6y agoHow long ago that decision were made? PlayCanvas is still here, doesn't look like it is going anywhere. For many years it existed, many people resist, some don't. But business is still here. And community grows. Portfolio of commercial projects as well.
- apsdsm 6y agoA bit over a year ago now, so at least that much time has passed. It looked like a very good product then, looks like a very good product now. When I spoke to their support I was actually helped out by their CTO so I always felt it was a pretty rooted place. But, at that time it didn’t meet our requirements.
- pjmlp 6y agoIt is a very nice engine, specially for those focused on Web only as target.
- sakidev 6y agoI wouldn't call it "web only", since the web runs everywhere. What PlayCanvas is king on, is having the same codebase and being able to play it on your desktop, laptop, mobile, and even smart tvs.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoWell, surely web-only means that it didn't make concessions to work on other targets like UIKit.
- pjmlp 6y agoDepends, many times, specially in what concerns games, it limps along.
- bluetwo 6y agoInteresting. I assume you can hook whatever javascript into it you want?
- ovenchips 6y agoYes. You can use it in conjunction with pretty much any other JS framework available.
- swagasaurus-rex 6y agoIs there support for networking/multiplayer games using this framework?
- ovenchips 6y agoThere's no networking built-in to the core engine but there's a tutorial to get started with Node.js: https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/tutorials/real-time-multiplayer/ https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/tutorials/real-time-mult... PlayCanvas also works great with third party networking solutions like Nakama from Heroic Labs: https://heroiclabs.com/ https://heroiclabs.com/
- rvz 6y agoInteresting to see that PlayCanvas is now owned by Snap Inc recently: [0] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/snap-reportedly-buys-its-own-3d-game-engine/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/snap-reportedly-buys-its-o...
- socialist_coder 6y agoI wonder how this has affected the development of PlayCanvas. I don't see any statements about the acquisition or even just a roadmap or statement about the future. It looks like Snap bought it + a game studio and then launched a few html5 games inside of Snapchat. But I dont see anything after that. Seems like maybe gaming inside of snapchat just fizzled out? That doesn't bode well for PlayCanvas development...
- cma 6y agoApple still blocks multitouch in fullscreen unfortunately.
- mekkkkkk 6y agoCould someone explain the USP of utilizing the browser platform for game dev? As far as I know, the usual suspects in the game engine world can compile to web as well as the other major platforms. Wouldn't relying on web runtimes and all the bloat associated be a detriment? Is it the JS ecosystem and [insert framework] UI that's tempting? Or just the shared dev environment?
- OmarShehata 6y agoCompiling from most major non-web game engines to the web leads to incredibly bloated products. See: https://blog.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-versus-unity-webgl/ https://blog.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-versus-unity-webgl/ The blog is 4 years old but I think it's still relevant.
- terrycody 6y agothank you so much for this reference, yeah really worth a reading, still very relevant today!
- hombre_fatal 6y agoYou don't see the USP of websites, apps, and games that run at a browser url instead of requiring app download? I encourage you to throw out your prejudices and try to answer that one yourself. Runescape is a good example. It ran on the school and library computers when nothing else could (much less anything that needed installation). Runescape is finally beta-testing native mobile apps, and it's hard to imagine it rising to so much fame for such a long time without its decision to run in the browser.
- hoten 6y ago> You don't see the USP of websites, apps, and games that run at a browser url instead of requiring app download? Unity, Unreal, Godot ... they all support the web as publishing targets. Without downloading a plugin. supporting the web is not unique. but if you design for the web, the engine will run better than compiling to it. > Runescape is finally beta-testing native mobile apps, and it's hard to imagine it rising to so much fame for such a long time without its decision to run in the browser. They've had a mobile version of "Old School Runescape" for over a year now I think, and it certainly did get me to play again for a bit. Mostly out of a curiosity of how they managed to fit all that UI on a mobile screen (turns out, pretty well).
- Shared404 6y agoI'll admit to being one of those anti-JS stick in the mud's, I really hate when people overload what should be a text doc with JS. However, this looks really cool. I think partially it's that once you are doing something at this level, you are no longer just turning a document into an app, you are writing an app that can be deployed almost anywhere. I think the future will trend in this direction to be honest. edit: tend -> trend
- zonf 6y agoAn example of what could be done with it: http://venge.io http://venge.io A competitive FPS shooter made in Playcanvas.
- thelazydogsback 6y agoAnyone know how compares to Godot webasm target?
- __m 6y agoI‘d love to be able to use their scene editor offline, uploading assets is a deal breaker