PlayCanvas WebGL game engine is open sourced

 

Today it was announced that PlayCanvas Game Engine has been open sourced.  PlayCanvas is a WebGL HTML5 game engine that runs across supported browsers, or on mobile devices using a solution such as CocoonJS.  Given yesterdays announcement that Safari for Mac and iOS 8 are both going to support WebGL, it is becoming much more viable.

 

Playcanvas logo

In their words, PlayCanvas engine is:

 

 

In case you haven’t come across the PlayCanvas Engine before, it’s a JavaScript library engineered specifically for building video games. It implements all of the major components that you need to write high quality games:

  • Graphics: model loading, per-pixel lighting, shadow mapping, post effects
  • Physics: rigid body simulation, ray casting, joints, trigger volumes, vehicles
  • Animation: keyframing, skeletal blending, skinning
  • Audio engine: 2D and 3D audio sources
  • Input devices: mouse, keyboard, touch and gamepad support
  • Entity-component system: high level game object management

 

It sounds very similar in scope to the Turbulenz engine I looked at last year.  One major difference is PlayCanvas includes a complete visual editor that runs in the browser:

 

Playcanvas

 

The code is now available on GitHub.

You can read the documentation here as well as the API reference here.

 

Keep in mind though, even though PlayCanvas is now open source, it is not completely free ( although a free tier exists ).  You can check out the pricing tiers here.


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