I am a Chinese developer. Playcanvas is excellent. My online service using Playcanvas is very slow. Will Playcanvas have an offline client in the future? Use free, unreal-like fees.
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Sorry about the experience in using PlayCanvas in Asia. We are looking to expand our infrastructure to better serve our users but unfortunately, don’t have a timeline yet.
An offline editor is not something we are looking to do at this time.
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I think you can just download it from GitHub and use it on a local “node.js” server.
I remember seeing someone called “whydoidoit??” doing something like that if I’m not mistaking.
If referring to the Babel template, you still use the online editor to handle 3D stuff and assets. Only you do script code editing from your own local computer and can have your own maintained seperate scripting codebase on github/repository.
@Glenn_Ko we also have a new tool called playcanvas-sync that makes it easier to write code offline and on your local PC https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync
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The editor is not open source, I want to deploy the editor locally. This will be more smooth to use. If this is based on business model considerations, can you refer to the charging method of unreal engine?
When you say deploy, do you mean deploying to your own server?
It’s not so simple to deploy to local server, and that’s part of the reason it cannot easily run locally. It has whole bunch of amazon servers running: databases / collaboration services / 10s of job types that execute in the cloud and similar. As @yaustar mentioned, we’re looking at improving availability and speed worldwide, and have been working on this for many months now, but at the moment don’t have plans to be able to run offline.
Full of expectations for the development of web game development tools such as PlayCanvas. The deployment threshold will not be the biggest obstacle. In fact, game development requires offline work in many parts of the world, and many companies require offline development based on project confidentiality.
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It’s an interesting point, and can definitely see a use case for offline (many times I’ve been on a train and wanting to open the editor). I think some of the issues are because, at the moment, asset pipeline stuff is handled remotely, which means if you’re offline, you can’t get them.
What might be interesting tho is to see if some can be updated to run client side, potentially ported to wasm. This might allow many, if not all asset conversions to happen locally and then eventually sync. Now I’m pretty sure it’s not as trivial as that, but food for thought.
There has been some thought about moving some of the processing client side such as Basis texture compression. Some pipelines such as FBX importing require licenses IIRC so that’s a bit more difficult until GLB importing is implemented.
Mid to Long term, we are looking to try to get the Editor frontend open sourced. That could allow someone to fork and make an offline version potentially?
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I think the most complex problem to solve is the data storage. We have database in the cloud, and that is used by many parts of the codebase. This needs to be abstracted to allow us to store the data in different format elsewhere, and that’s a huge job.
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Yeah I can imagine. Needless to say; you wouldn’t be able to preview any changes anyway since launch.playcanvas loads all it’s content from cloud storage