I’m developing games by PlayCanvas for bussiness use.
My team manager want to know the future vision of PlayCanvas.
In this quarter, we should decide keep R&D for this, or not .
Could you tell me your plan in publishable ?
1 Like
We have some pretty amazing new features planned for release in the weeks and months ahead.
Some users may have been following updates to the engine on GitHub. If you don’t already watch that project, I recommend you do that to be notified of the latest updates. If you have been keeping an eye on it, you may have noticed code relating to lightmapping. Very soon, we will be enabling lightmapping support in the Editor. This will allow you to make beautifully lit 3D scenes very quickly that perform extremely well even on mobile.
Other areas of work will be around how PlayCanvas handles scripts. We’re planning a new script format that allows for concatenation, inheritance and much more besides. It’s very cool.
Team working is another big focus, enabling larger and larger teams to work fluidly together in parallel.
If you are not about to talk publicly about your plans, can you private message me with details about the features that are important to you and your team manager? It would be good to know more about your priorities and see how we can help you better.
2 Likes
Here are just a few major areas we will be working this year, and that is just a glimpse of them:
-
Asset Variants - textures and sound is supported in different ways on different platforms. There are texture formats that are more optimised for some specific platforms. Although the only generic supported formats which we use currently are: jpg and png. We want to add: s3tc, pvrtc, etc1, atc (maybe not all, we’ll see in the future). And user should not even worry about that. Engine will check what supported by platform and what variants are available, and will stream best matching. This will lead to many benefits:
a. Smaller download sizes, so faster downloads.
b. Less VRAM usage on mobile.
c. Even faster sampling of textures on GPU, leading to some fill rate performance improvements. -
New Script system - @will already mentioned it, but I will add few most important parts of it:
a. Concatenation - reduces loading times.
b. Minification - lets users to better guard their code and it will reduce download size/times.
c. Code Hot Swap - that is my favourite. We are planning to structure it so that developers will be able to add some code to handle code hot swap - reloading of scripts while your application is still running, without a need to refresh it.
d. Simplification - we are looking at more vanilla solution, to make it simpler and easier to get used to. -
Team Collaboration - @will mentioned it as well. This is quiet unique challenge to our case. As we highly rely on real-time collaboration, we can’t just throw some versioning system, as it doesn’t really solves a problem of too many people modifying codebase or assets in the same environment. So allowing users to isolate (branch-out) and merge back - we think is the way to go. But once time comes to this challenge, we will try all options that will come to our minds, to find what we believe is best for our users.
And there are always things that we add without planning them months in advance, they might be small, or relatively big. It very depends on the case. We do value opinion of our users and clients, so they have good influence on our decisions, so we can make everyone happy 
2 Likes
Impressed !
I’ll report your answers to my manager.
I wanna keep creating with this !
2 Likes
Such an awesome roadmap indeed!
Are there any news regarding new lightmapping feature? Eager to test it out! Will it be a pro-only feature btw?
First iteration on lightmapping is coming very soon (days).
It will be available to all users.
It’s great, can’t wait!