The popular 3D game engine PlayCanvas has just been fully open sourced. The backend game engine powering PlayCanvas has always been open sourced, as has the UI framework, but the game editor has always been closed and proprietary. This has just changed with today’s announcement:
Today, we are thrilled to announce the open sourcing of the PlayCanvas Editor Frontend!
The PlayCanvas Editor is a powerful visual editing environment for building WebGL, WebGPU, and WebXR applications. It has been the cornerstone of countless incredible projects, many of which you can explore on the PlayCanvas website. While the PlayCanvas Engine has always been open source, the Editor Frontend, a key component of the PlayCanvas ecosystem, has not. That changes today!
✅ Why Open Source the Editor Frontend?
Open sourcing the Editor Frontend brings a host of benefits, not just for us, but for the entire PlayCanvas community:
- Faster Feature Development: Community contributions will accelerate the development of new features and improvements.
- Enhanced Stability: With more eyes on the code, bugs can be identified and resolved more quickly, leading to a more stable and robust editor.
- Customization and Bespoke Use Cases: Developers can now create custom Editor Frontend versions, connecting them to our backend for highly specialized workflows and integrations.
- Improved Understanding: A more transparent codebase will allow developers to better understand how the Editor functions, making it easier to contribute and debug.
Key Links
PlayCanvas Open-Source Announcement
You can learn more about PlayCanvas and the PlayCanvas Editor being open-sourced in the video below.