Following hot in the late 2020 preview release of Cocos Creator 3, today Cocos Creator 3 is now ready for production use. The Cocos Creator 3 release is absolutely packed with features, by far and away the biggest new feature being the new 3D functionality joining the existing 2D game engine (that we have a complete tutorial series available for here). This new release is also built on an all new renderer with the following new features:
- Supports multiple rendering backends of Metal, Vulkan, WebGL 1.0, WebGL 2.0, GLES2, GLES3, and provides a unified GFX graphics API layer to the rendering pipeline layer.
- The GFX API design close to the modern graphics API helps the rendering pipeline layer to release the performance and possibilities provided by the modern graphics API as much as possible.
- Built-in forward rendering pipeline, support user-defined rendering pipeline.
- Physically based light sources, cameras and materials help developers use industrialized processes to create the most realistic visual effects.
- Supports GPU Instancing batch optimization, which is suitable for drawing a large number of dynamic models with the same mesh, and supports instancing batches of models containing skeletal animation calculations.
- Support global fog effect.
- Powerful native renderer, using memory sharing mechanism to reduce JSB calls and speed up data access.
- Support ASTC, ETC, ETC2, PVR and other compressed textures.
The all new renderer is by no means the only new feature in Cocos Creator 3. There is now Tiled (tutorial series here) tilemap support, 3D terrains support and tools, a streamlined user interface, new material support and so much more.
You can download Cocos Creator and read the release notes here. You can learn more about Cocos Creator and see it in action in the video below.