The HTML5 base 3D game engine PlayCanvas has been covered several times here on GameFromScratch, both in the Closer Look series, as well as a more recent 3D game tutorial. It has been under development for several years, but just yesterday it finally hit that biggest of milestones, a 1.0 release. There wasn’t actually a huge number of changes in the 1.0 release, in fact there was only a single minor source change. It’s more a sign of confidence from the PlayCanvas team about the maturity of the game engine.
From the PlayCanvas blog:
PlayCanvas was born 7 years ago, way back on 9th May 2011. In the early days, we were essentially prototyping, seeing what this amazing new WebGL API could do. By October 2011, we set up a source code repository and committed our first engine prototype. Right at the beginning, we adopted semantic versioning for naming our releases. Our initial commit generated engine v0.10.0. From that point onwards, we adopted a rapid release cadence, often publishing more than one release a week. The months and years passed, our team grew and feature after feature was integrated into the codebase. But through all that time, we never incremented the major version number. Why? Well, there were several reasons:
- Our rapid deployment meant we never delivered a monster release that seemed to warrant going to 1.0.0.
- We always made a huge effort to maintain backwards compatiblity. Projects like the inane Doom3: Gangnam Style created in December 2011 still work fine today! So we never (intentionally) broke your projects.
- We, uh, just never got around to it!
The PlayCanvas API is now very stable, mature and battle-hardened. Backwards compatibility is something we take very seriously indeed. And today, PlayCanvas is used in production by thousands of developers.