Offline editor engine

Help & Support
1

It is possible to use the playcanvas without connection to the internet ?

2

The PlayCanvas Editor requires a net connection. However, you can use the PlayCanvas Engine framework on its own if you wish (or even build your own tools on top of it).

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3

Can we run it locally, like if we are to use MAMP or something similar?

4

Any web server including python’s simple server should work fine so yes, you can run it on localhost on your computer.

Edit: Please note, I am referring to the only the engine part of PlayCanvas. As Will mentioned, you cannot run the editor offline/standalone.

5

There is loads of processes and hard-lifting going on on our servers to ensure Editor is fast and handles everything such as: real-time collaboration, texture conversion, files uploading, assets meta and converting, publishing, and many many other things. Those are not a simple single client-facing app, due to this complexity, Editor (only front-end) cannot be separated from those services (back-end) and cannot be used as stand-alone.

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I have experience with server side stuff, and I know it would easier to run all that locally. Pain to initially setup, but its possible for sure.

If its the pricing, thats sounds more reasoning. Which is totally fine, makes complete sense.

Its just personally don’t feel comfortable putting project files on someone else’s server (even if its private), and expect their server to be up, who knows who’s looking at it, I want to make the changes locally because its faster, etc.

7

Not wanting to sound flippant or anything but…does that mean you don’t use GMail, Google Docs or similar services? If not, fine, but there’s a general trend towards cloud based productivity platforms. Some are fine using them and enjoy the associated benefits. Others will choose not to, due to reasons such as those you mention. Ultimately, it’s your decision to make. But if companies like Disney, King, Nickelodeon, ARM, Mozilla and others are relaxed about using PlayCanvas, I think most other folks will be too.

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8

Heya everyone, I know this thread is old but since the servers are lagging right now and I am thus unable to work on a project: PC is different from mail or cloud services since this tool is way more complex and you do not have a good substitution to work in offline (e.g. while traveling or when the PC servers are experiencing issues). I can still write my mails in word if gmail is down and then send the e-mail as soon as the service is back up. When the PC servers are experiencing issues I simply cannot work.

I would be very thankful to be able to self-host a mirror of the PC editor (minus the collaboration feature maybe?). Since PC is a great engine for B2B contexts it is mandatory imo that you can use the tool 24/7.

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Just want to make sure you’ve seen that the Editor/Launch Page has been back for around an hour now. I’ll follow up on your post in a bit though.

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I’m back! Just wanted to follow up on your comments, @EmergoEntertainment.

So first up, I want to highlight some important work we’ve been doing related to the PlayCanvas back-end. About 18 months ago, we started to completely rearchitect our back-end infrastructure with a few goals:

  1. Reduce downtime - We wanted to make PlayCanvas even more reliable.
  2. Reduce latency - We wanted to improve PlayCanvas’ (network) performance, and give everyone a great developer experience no matter their geographic location.
  3. Improve scalability - We wanted to adapt to serve a growing userbase.

The outage we had earlier today falls under goal 1. And while we are close to finishing our back-end upgrade, we’re still a couple of days away from deploying a solution to what was today’s issue. So while I’m disappointed about today’s disruption, I’m really excited to see all the hard work from the last year and a half finally come to fruition. Expect to see a blog article about all the back-end improvements sometime in the not too distant future.

Now, despite all that, getting hold of some flavor of a local Editor is a request we’ve seen from time to time. PlayCanvas in its current form is a hugely complex thing, especially in terms of its back-end. To install it is non-trivial. I don’t think it is practical to offer it as a product in that form, at least not at the moment. In addition, the collaborative/real-time nature of the Editor is fundamental to how it works and would be exceptionally difficult to extract/disable.

That said, we are on a journey at the moment that, so far, has gradually open sourced parts of the Editor:

  • PCUI - The Editor’s front-end framework.
  • PCUI-Graph - The PCUI plugin for rendering node-based graphs used in the Editor’s AnimStateGraph Editor.
  • Observer - The observer pattern implementation used by the Editor.
  • Editor API - The core functions of the Editor wrapped up in a module and exposed as an API for your own plugins.

In addition, we’ve been developing other ‘offline’/client-side tools too, like:

When I last responded in this thread, none of this technology was open source.

So what does this mean for the Editor? While I don’t think we’ll be in a position to release an offline version in the near future, I believe we are on a path that will allow for this some day (in some form or other). Fundamentally, we are committed to an open source mission and enabling developers to work in a way that is best for them. So stay tuned - we’ll try to keep the community up to date on our plans in the months ahead.

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11

Thanks for the detailed reply @will That does sound good & gives me the impression that the Play Canvas team truly cares about making the best tool possible :slight_smile: Happy to be using PlayCanvas.

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