BUILD | TOOLS // GAME ENGINES Reframing the game engine
PlayCanvas offers something distinct from the established game engines, and it’s just gone open-source. Will Freeman speaks to CEO and co-founder Will Eastcott about providing an alternative tool for development
What makes PlayCanvas a distinct engine? PlayCanvas is the world’s first cloud-hosted game development platform. It has been built on top of our open-source engine that’s written in JavaScript and powered by HTML5 and WebGL.
Will Eastcott (above) says PlayCanvas (main) is a direct response to the plethora of available platforms and the nature of the increasingly adopted distributed development method
It provides all of the things you would expect from a modern, cutting edge engine: a visual editor, integrated physics engine, advanced graphics and so on. Beyond that, PlayCanvas is completely unique. The tools are multi-user in the style of Google Docs. It’s the first engine to run on mobile as well as the desktop. And because PlayCanvas is a website, we’ve been able to build a rich social experience around the tools.
You very recently switched the engine over to be open-source. Why?
It really comes down to what’s better for the developer. It’s completely clear that PlayCanvas users are better off for having full, unrestricted access to our codebase. They’re able to figure out precisely how the engine works, debug when things go wrong and drive it in the most efficient way possible.
42 | JULY 2014
They’re also able to directly contribute to the development of the engine, whether that’s correcting a spelling mistake in a code comment, or submitting a major feature back for integration. It’s a major win for all parties. In the traditional middleware space, open sourcing technology is highly unusual. But in the world of web development, companies are pretty relaxed about it. There’s definitely a cultural difference there, and something that took us a while to adjust to, but I’m 100 per cent confident it’s the right move for us.
What do you think the long-term impact of going open-source could be, in terms of the its evolution and the games it creates? In the long-term, we’ll see the engine become more stable, perform better and offer more features than if we had remained closed source. This is all very good news but what excites me is finding smarter, more efficient ways of making games. It’s the tools that matter. I strongly believe that the web and the cloud will see the rise of interconnected applications that can co-operate in ways that would be impossible on the desktop.
So down the road, we’ll see the engine driving an ecosystem of tools that will complement our cloud platform. For example, imagine an online, collaborative 3D sculpting tool that can pipe models directly to a user’s project on PlayCanvas. Or a tool that can read models from PlayCanvas projects, optimise them somehow and write them back. The PlayCanvas engine can power all of these kinds of projects.
And why a WebGL/HTML5-focused engine? A lot of start-ups form out of frustration and PlayCanvas is no exception. In the engine space, there’s way too much emphasis on rendering prettier pixels. Engine technology simply hasn’t adapted to massive changes in how we work. Today, I regularly collaborate with others in cloud applications. I spend just as much time on a mobile device as I do on a laptop. And I spend too many hours on social networks. It seems obvious to me that any engine that’s built to address these shifts will be built on the web, for the web. HTML5 and WebGL are the only serious choice of technologies to make that happen.
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