Development has begun on the PlayCanvas editor plugins feature. Once released you’ll be able to create your own extensions to the editor UI. In the future, you’ll also be able to share plugins you’ve created in the editor’s asset store. We’ve created a little preview of what will be possible with plugins here:
We want to ensure we’re building a system that’s flexible enough to cover a broad set of use cases, so we’d love to hear your thoughts on editor plugins while development is still underway. As you can see in the video we’re already experimenting with plugins that can hook into different parts of the editor UI. We’ve developed general purpose editor plugins, as well as those that can hook directly into the entity / asset inspector panels.
We’re also looking to create an editor plugins API which will allow you to swiftly create UI and Gizmos etc. We’ll be creating this interface in a way that we can keep stable going forward even as the editor platform evolves, perhaps through versioning. We want to ensure that once the editor plugin feature has been officially released, any plugins you create using this specific API will continue to be supported going forward.
Please do post here with examples of editor extensions you’ve created in the past, any ideas for parts of the editor UI you’d like to extend, or any plugins you’ve always dreamed of having in the editor.
We’ll also be keeping you updated on progress of this feature in this thread, so please follow it if you’re interested! Active participants will have the opportunity to test out an early version of editor plugins in the coming months.
First of I gotta say thank you for the work on this new feature. This is definitely something playcanvas is currently missing.
For us it would be awesome to draw custom gizmos when selecting specific entities. We have a pretty sophisticated orbit camera system which we developed in Unity and ported to playcanvas.
In Unity we display the cameras movement range around a target by drawing custom gizmos:
Would be nice to have something similar in playcanvas. Currently we have to test in play mode, to get a feeling for how the camera behaves around a target.
This is great news! Things I miss in PC coming from Unity are stuff like visualizing spline animations in the scene view, a timeline animation editor, and scriptable objects. And enabling plugins will definitely be good for the PC community in general. Thanks for keeping developing the platform!
This is something I’ve wanted for so long. Plugins will be a game changer!
We currently use a browser extension that reuse earlier materials, removes duplicates, and adds bake textures on materials based on file names. This is currently done after import, by manually clicking a button. With editor plugins we could override the default asset import process, and customize it to our needs.
Some other features I’ve had on my mind:
Custom components such as splines, projected decals and reflection probes, and the ability to draw them in the viewport
Hello!
Could the Editor Plugin possibly have similar functionality to the Editor API?
I have had the pleasure of creating several projects using the Editor API. The following are some examples of the projects I’ve worked on. I am still eager to continue using the Editor API in the future:
The ability to alter models in the editor. Cut meshes, join them together, fill empty faces…
Ability to alter animations and save them from the editor
Occlusion culling for the camera. (You have frustum culling, but occlusion culling is much better since it doesn’t render anything that cannot be seen from the camera point of view)
Hi, I saw a kind of animation(?) in the editor in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJJZWb7Sdk some people thought that was a pro feature. Is that true, or is there a way to animate in the editor for free, is this a beta plugin thing. Thanks!
@Code_Knight It was a work in progress of one of the community members. Not official PlayCanvas feature. All features in PlayCanvas are same between free and paid users. There is no difference in features.
