This coming Tuesday we will hold a public event (for at least 50+ JS developers here in Sweden) and live-code a VR demo in PlayCanvas. We’ve already prepared a presentation and planned all the steps, including showing how easy it is to get started using the official “VR Starter Kit” template. However, I just noticed during the weekend that it has been removed, which has us a little worried:
Is there a specific reason behind the “VR Starter Kit” template removal? And are there any short-term plans on re-adding or replacing it?
Does this mean that the original “Starter Kit: VR” project (which the template was based on) will also be removed and is no longer officially supported?
Are there any other changes planned for the editor (especially in relation to WebVR) this coming week, that we should probably be prepared for?
PlayCanvas has removed dependencies on external libraries such as the WebVR polyfill and ammo.js. PlayCanvas forks were out of date which meant that WebVR didn’t work due to changes in the Chrome browser on mobile. (See thread here: VR Sensitivity issue on mobile)
They have instead added support for including external files from CDNs etc so you can include the latest version of the polyfill.
Unfortunately, this means that some WebVR projects are now broken as the developer has to include and initialise the polyfill themselves.
To be clear, I’m not sure what will happen to the existing PlayCanvas projects for WebVR. The engine itself still supports the existing WebVR API so there is nothing stopping developers importing the polyfill manually to build WebVR apps with PlayCanvas
Sorry for the late response, we have removed the starter kit because it was not working. I believe the plan is to add it back now that we fixed it though so I’ll get back to you asap.
