Hello everybody
I just came here to say that I love playcanvas and its small but active community !
I am just a hobbyist… I make stuff just for fun. I am into the demoscene
I made a couples of demos with a great but now dead engine called Goo (the editor was perfect !) but alas like all good things it got bought buy a big company who destroyed it. It is now Amazon sumerian (which sucks)
Then I used a small editor based on threejs Nunustudio. Its a really great work from the author but unfortunately it is full of bugs… I have know playcanvas for a long time but for some reason I did not like it much.
Now I am getting to use it more and more I love it… I also love the community around…
Voila 
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Looking at their engine and what it can do, in addition to their editor and tools, I can’t really understand why this isn’t getting more attention. The engine looks great, has support for common file types like FBX, an online cloud based editor with live collaboration, physics, events, game object component system, and more. I’ve been following it for a few years and improvements keep coming steadily. Documentation has been improved a TON since before. Yet no games are made. Not even Game Jam games (unless I’m missing something?).
In the HTML5/JS space, 2d options are Pixi and Phaser, and for 3d there’s babylon and three.js, yet most of those are more akin to frameworks, requiring more from the developer to get things rolling. I see huge benefits in working with an engine like PlayCanvas, especially for hobbyist or smaller projects. The games can be hosted and played online without needing any download. How many more people do you think would play your game if you just gave them a url instead of having to download via steam or app store?
The biggest complaint I have with it, is the lack of a prefab system
The cost is another talking point at $15 a month for personal version ($50 for pro), versus Unity and Unreal’s offers. Yet the free version allows unlimited projects and 200mb worth of public storage. They say the engine is free and open source and available on git (which it is), but let’s face it nobody is going to use it without their tooling. The tooling includes file importers for models and animations, as well as the scene and text editor.
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Agreed! It’s remarkable what could be achieved with it, but for absolute newbie like myself it took a bit to get my head around how entities and scripts work, it wasn’t that hard and once understood you can start to see the endless potential. It’s like photoshop but you need to write your own paintbrush tool.
And the way projects are public and can be shared, edited and forked is genius really and will only assist in its growth. It’s an amazing approach to learn, share and quickly prototype things.
As a creative/non-programmer, and without cluttering an already usable clean smart interface, i’d love to see a way of choosing a “workplace” layout that would preload a lot of prewritten scripts (like Motion.js) that could be easily selected in menus and applied to entities.
But i’m only 3 days into using PC and i’m already blown away. Great job devs and i hope to hang around awhile.
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PlayCanvas does have a prefab system since about 1-2 years. They are called templates. You can look it up here:
https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/user-manual/templates/
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I’d love to use it like I used Construct (which I made a 3D game in with their rudimentary 3D) but I’m not a programmer and Construct’s event system was easy to work with. Anytime I have to look at code beyond anything linear like BASIC or macro languages I glaze over, and I’ve been trying for decades. Maybe with visual programming they’d catch more of the interested hobbyists/non-programmers. But that’s a lot to ask.
1 Like