I just started working with the PlayCanvas engine (as apposed to building my own for this game using ThreeJS) and I was curious about the loading screen and being able to download the source of the game created.
I was planning on implementing a patch system for my game, the patch system would make use of websockets and CRC32 caching, however I haven’t run into any local-caching for game objects / models / etc. It seems like they’re downloaded every time. Is it possible to load resources from the local computer?
Also, is it possible to host our game somewhere other than playcanvas? I was going to make a downloadable client as-well. (Still debating on having a native downloadable, or just a integrated browser native port) but it’d be nice for the people who just want to have it downloaded. Also works great for mobile.
Whilst we don’t do it yet, it should be possible to extend the resource loader to look for locally cached resources before trying to load from the network. It’s something I’ve had plans to do for a while, but haven’t had the time or reason to do yet.
You are free to download and host your game where-ever you like. The loading screen can be customized by Org account holders.
I assume you meant “pro” and not “org” account holders, correct?
Does PlayCanvas accept outside contributions? I may work on a resource loader that allows reading from external data here soon. It’s definitely not high up on my list, but if it’s something you don’t have already, perhaps it could help.
One thing I’ve noticed that playcanvas doesn’t have that is really a letdown as a visual game-editor is simple UI mechanics. Take into consideration Unity’s new UI system where you don’t have to know anything about programming to have a nice game UI going, you literally just drop some 2D stuff in and the buttons/drag/release/text/etc are all handled for you. I’ve implemented some of this in WebGL before with very little experience, so I don’t feel like it should be that hard to complete.
I’m aware we can do this with DOM/SVG from inside of scripts, but some basic Right click -> Add texture | Add textbox | Add button functionality would be really cool.
Customized loading is only available for the org accounts, pro accounts must keep the PlayCanvas screen during preloading.
We have recently added support for HTML and CSS assets which you can use combined with a templating library [like Hogan or Mustache] to build a complete UI.
We also have some code on our github which lets you use 2D sprites and fonts.
But you’re right we’d love to have more support for building UI’s in the Editor. We’ll get there, but there is a long list of things to do
