Future of Playcanvas

I’ve been using Playcanvas for a few months now, and I’ve grown quite fond of it. Compared to engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot it has a very compact feature set, while still being extremely usable in most cases. Some friends of mine who used it back in 2014-2015 were shocked when they saw how far it has come since then.

One thing that really struck me is how easy playcanvas is to use once you have learned the basics. It is great for quick prototyping, but is also quite capable of scaling up for larger projects. Although tutorials are few and the documentation can be somewhat bare at times, it is not difficult to learn using the provided manuals. Thanks for making playcanvas an incredible (and accessible) platform for game development!

So my question is this: what does the future development of playcanvas look like? What can we expect in the future?

  • Typescript support?
  • Plug-in system for the editor?
  • User contributions to asset library?

And, more importantly, how can the community help in the development process?

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The engine is open source so the GitHub issues is a good first point of call. There is even a label for ‘First PR request’ to get you started. https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/issues

Other developers have taken to extending the engine by adding features. eg:
Terrain editor: New release: Tiled Terrain Manager v1.20
Blend!: RELEASED: Blend! 3D Animation Blending For PlayCanvas 1.0.1
Even working out a way to develop locally: TEMPLATE: ES6 | Version Control | NPM | PlayCanvas
Unofficial Chrome Extension: FREE: PlayCanvas Editor Extension v1.4.3

The engine can also easily be monkey patched if there is a some unique to your application.

GLTF support is being looked into: https://playcanvas.com/project/512016/overview/gltf
Some developers are also integrating other libraries like p2.js for a lightweight 2D library: https://playcanvas.com/project/446127/overview/p2js-integration

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I noticed that the repo hasn’t been committed to in over 2 weeks, is there a release of some kind coming up?

Work may be done in public/private branches or they are working directly on the editor code (which is closed source).

Some PRs are in review as well. Eg: 2D sprite support: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/pull/1034

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