PlayCanvas WebGL Game Engine

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PlayCanvas is an open-source game engine. It uses HTML5 and WebGL to run games and other interactive 3D content in any mobile or desktop browser.

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Project Showcase

Many games and apps have been published using the PlayCanvas engine. Here is a small selection:

You can see more games on the PlayCanvas website.

Users

PlayCanvas is used by leading companies in video games, advertising and visualization such as:
Animech, Arm, BMW, Disney, Facebook, Famobi, Funday Factory, IGT, King, Miniclip, Leapfrog, Mojiworks, Mozilla, Nickelodeon, Nordeus, NOWWA, PikPok, PlaySide Studios, Polaris, Product Madness, Samsung, Snap, Spry Fox, Zeptolab, Zynga

Features

PlayCanvas is a fully featured game engine.

🧊 Graphics - Advanced 2D + 3D graphics engine built on WebGL 1 & 2.
🏃 Animation - Powerful state-based animations for characters and arbitrary scene properties
⚛️ Physics - Full integration with 3D rigid-body physics engine ammo.js
🎮 Input - Mouse, keyboard, touch, gamepad and VR controller APIs
🔊 Sound - 3D positional sounds built on the Web Audio API
📦 Assets - Asynchronous streaming system built on glTF 2.0, Draco and Basis compression
📜 Scripts - Write game behaviors in Typescript or JavaScript

Usage

Here's a super-simple Hello World example - a spinning cube!

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>PlayCanvas Hello Cube</title>
    <meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, user-scalable=no' />
    <style>
        body {
            margin: 0;
            overflow: hidden;
        }
    </style>
    <script src='https://code.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-stable.min.js'></script>
</head>
<body>
    <canvas id='application'></canvas>
    <script>
        // create a PlayCanvas application
        const canvas = document.getElementById('application');
        const app = new pc.Application(canvas);

        // fill the available space at full resolution
        app.setCanvasFillMode(pc.FILLMODE_FILL_WINDOW);
        app.setCanvasResolution(pc.RESOLUTION_AUTO);

        // ensure canvas is resized when window changes size
        window.addEventListener('resize', () => app.resizeCanvas());

        // create box entity
        const box = new pc.Entity('cube');
        box.addComponent('model', {
            type: 'box'
        });
        app.root.addChild(box);

        // create camera entity
        const camera = new pc.Entity('camera');
        camera.addComponent('camera', {
            clearColor: new pc.Color(0.1, 0.1, 0.1)
        });
        app.root.addChild(camera);
        camera.setPosition(0, 0, 3);

        // create directional light entity
        const light = new pc.Entity('light');
        light.addComponent('light');
        app.root.addChild(light);
        light.setEulerAngles(45, 0, 0);

        // rotate the box according to the delta time since the last frame
        app.on('update', dt => box.rotate(10 * dt, 20 * dt, 30 * dt));

        app.start();
    </script>
</body>
</html>

Want to play with the code yourself? Edit it on CodePen.

How to build

Ensure you have Node.js installed. Then, install all of the required Node.js dependencies:

npm install

Now you can run various build options:

Command	Description	Outputs
`npm run build`	Build release, min, debug and profiler engines	`build\playcanvas[.min/.dbg/.prf].[mjs/js]`
`npm run build:es5`	Build release, min, debug and profiler engines for es5 only	`build\playcanvas[.min/.dbg/.prf].js`
`npm run build:release`	Build release engine for es5 and es6	`build\playcanvas.[mjs/js]`
`npm run build:types`	Build engine Typescript bindings	`build\playcanvas.d.ts`
`npm run docs`	Build engine API reference docs	`docs`

Pre-built versions of the engine are also available.

Latest development release (head revision of dev branch):

Latest stable release:

Specific engine versions:

Generate Source Maps

To build the source map to allow for easier engine debugging, you can add -- -m to any engine build command. For example:

npm run build -- -m

This will output to build/playcanvas.js.map

PlayCanvas Editor

The PlayCanvas Engine is an open source engine which you can use to create HTML5 apps/games. In addition to the engine, we also make the PlayCanvas Editor:

For Editor related bugs and issues, please refer to the Editor's repo.