I’ve been following and building with Playcanvas since 2015, and then started paying for it 2017 or so.
I have to say I wasted quite a lot of money, something like over £1000 just on this editor / engine and for what ?
No documentation or hardly any documentation for code that exists in the source, even the main guys Will etc won’t know how to use it or why its there. Its simply up to us to mess about till we find a solution, spending far too much time faffing about.
No decent way to trawl through pages of code without going through the editor and then back, so troubleshooting solutions is long and ineffective.
The usual Pcanvas affiliated support tend to try and sweep any questions under the rug by declaring it to be the fault of the developer or nothing to do with Playcanvas when its the total opposite.
What is missing ?
The version control system is shoddy as hell, How do you deal with gigabytes of filled data just sitting there in versions before? Ludicrous.
Materials do not work properly. Any transparency you add will appear opaque from certain angles, especially in orthographic mode.
No real physics solutions, just a bunch of excuses and shoddy attempts at using web-worker by some forum members.
Price gouging simple things like basic shaders, terrain, FX being done by some developers. Not their fault really! but annoying nonetheless since these features should be available in playcanvas and not further purchased.
No Animator for humanoid, but in the guts of the engine code there is a Skeleton api which can be used to modify avatars and mask bones. Again you have to build this entirely yourself.
Why BabylonJS?
Within minutes I had my old game code within BabylonJS and replaced all the usual Playcanvas Engine / UI code and had it up and running with PLENTY of documentation and examples. All the hiccups you would experience with Playcanvas(no universal input, no generalised raycast system, no layered raycasting, etc etc etc LIST GOES ON) was fixed. Playcanvas feels like an engine built by developers with not much experience in Development(seriously). You can see it in the documentation and in the guts of the engine code.
Not to mention now PCanvas doing laps for Snap, at their beck and call adding stuff ahead of the issue list. Before Snap purchased Playcanvas, the version number was 0.3 or 0.1. Suddenly it shot up to 1.0, I’m amazing it made such a stride considering the lack of features.