
PlayCanvas, the Web-first game engine - wiradikusuma
https://playcanvas.com/
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apsdsm
For what it’s worth, when I was working at a mobile game studio, we looked at
this as an engine for a project. At the time we decided not to go with it
since all your code needs to live on their server and there’s no easy local
dev environment.

Not sure what the state of play for this product is now, but at the time we
considered it too risky a proposition (what if they go out of business
tomorrow?) and too limiting for the cost they were asking to use their
platform.

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wiradikusuma
what did you guys end up using?

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hirako2000
I also went down that route and opted for three.js The downside is no decent
game engine nor IDE, you end up writing your own engine and tooling.

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apsdsm
Same cons that we came up with too. Which means it’s that’s much harder for
anyone who isn’t a developer to make contributions to things like level
design.

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rvz
Interesting to see that PlayCanvas is now owned by Snap Inc recently: [0]

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/snap-reportedly-buys-
its-o...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/snap-reportedly-buys-its-
own-3d-game-engine/)

~~~
socialist_coder
I wonder how this has affected the development of PlayCanvas. I don't see any
statements about the acquisition or even just a roadmap or statement about the
future.

It looks like Snap bought it + a game studio and then launched a few html5
games inside of Snapchat. But I dont see anything after that. Seems like maybe
gaming inside of snapchat just fizzled out? That doesn't bode well for
PlayCanvas development...

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endergen
Their lenses I think are all JavaScript, not sure if it’s WebGl rendering
though, but it would make sense to do that to be cross platform

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zonf
An example of what could be done with it: [http://venge.io](http://venge.io)

A competitive FPS shooter made in Playcanvas.

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mekkkkkk
Could someone explain the USP of utilizing the browser platform for game dev?
As far as I know, the usual suspects in the game engine world can compile to
web as well as the other major platforms. Wouldn't relying on web runtimes and
all the bloat associated be a detriment?

Is it the JS ecosystem and [insert framework] UI that's tempting? Or just the
shared dev environment?

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hombre_fatal
You don't see the USP of websites, apps, and games that run at a browser url
instead of requiring app download? I encourage you to throw out your
prejudices and try to answer that one yourself.

Runescape is a good example. It ran on the school and library computers when
nothing else could (much less anything that needed installation). Runescape is
finally beta-testing native mobile apps, and it's hard to imagine it rising to
so much fame for such a long time without its decision to run in the browser.

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hoten
> You don't see the USP of websites, apps, and games that run at a browser url
> instead of requiring app download?

Unity, Unreal, Godot ... they all support the web as publishing targets.
Without downloading a plugin. supporting the web is not unique. but if you
design for the web, the engine will run better than compiling to it.

> Runescape is finally beta-testing native mobile apps, and it's hard to
> imagine it rising to so much fame for such a long time without its decision
> to run in the browser.

They've had a mobile version of "Old School Runescape" for over a year now I
think, and it certainly did get me to play again for a bit. Mostly out of a
curiosity of how they managed to fit all that UI on a mobile screen (turns
out, pretty well).

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esperent
Unreal no longer supports the web as a publishing target. They've marked that
feature as deprecated. Unity still does, however, from what I've heard it's
not a great platform to use for the web. Godot's wasm compile target is very
new, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes from it.

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bluetwo
Interesting. I assume you can hook whatever javascript into it you want?

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ovenchips
Yes. You can use it in conjunction with pretty much any other JS framework
available.

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Shared404
I'll admit to being one of those anti-JS stick in the mud's, I really hate
when people overload what should be a text doc with JS. However, this looks
really cool.

I think partially it's that once you are doing something at this level, you
are no longer just turning a document into an app, you are writing an app that
can be deployed almost anywhere.

I think the future will trend in this direction to be honest.

edit: tend -> trend

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pjmlp
It is a very nice engine, specially for those focused on Web only as target.

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sakidev
I wouldn't call it "web only", since the web runs everywhere. What PlayCanvas
is king on, is having the same codebase and being able to play it on your
desktop, laptop, mobile, and even smart tvs.

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hombre_fatal
Well, surely web-only means that it didn't make concessions to work on other
targets like UIKit.

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cma
Apple still blocks multitouch in fullscreen unfortunately.

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kuon
Really? For webviews?

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__m
In Safari

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__m
I‘d love to be able to use their scene editor offline, uploading assets is a
deal breaker

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swagasaurus-rex
Is there support for networking/multiplayer games using this framework?

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ovenchips
There's no networking built-in to the core engine but there's a tutorial to
get started with Node.js: [https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/tutorials/real-
time-mult...](https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/tutorials/real-time-
multiplayer/) PlayCanvas also works great with third party networking
solutions like Nakama from Heroic Labs:
[https://heroiclabs.com/](https://heroiclabs.com/)

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thelazydogsback
Anyone know how compares to Godot webasm target?

