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Comment by apsdsm | Hacker News Reader

For what it’s worth, when I was working at a mobile game studio, we looked at this as an engine for a project. At the time we decided not to go with it since all your code needs to live on their server and there’s no easy local dev environment.

Not sure what the state of play for this product is now, but at the time we considered it too risky a proposition (what if they go out of business tomorrow?) and too limiting for the cost they were asking to use their platform.

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I recommend checking out the newly released playcanvas-sync tools which let you map your PlayCanvas project's assets to your local machine's file system: https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync Also, last month, the plans received a major upgrade: https://blog.playcanvas.com/plan-updates-more-storage-more-f...

It's certainly not super obvious to setup but there are ways to use PlayCanvas with local setup[1]. I have Redirector[2] rules in my browser and that basically handles it. So with some tinkering you can have hot module replacement and front-end libraries integrated for a very smooth and web-dev-y modern workflow.

[1] https://github.com/thisredone/coffeescript-playcanvas-templa... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirector/ocgpenf...

I think the engine is open source; but the real appeal is using the real time collab online tool, which is proprietary and had the drawbacks you mention.

The engine absolutely is open source, and there are no clauses pertaining to where the code must be hosted.

Their particular IDE may be closed-source, but the engine is not tied to it.

IIRC playcanvas was started by ex-mozilla people.

I played around with the engine a while ago and was quite impressed by the all-in-one-ness of it.

PlayCanvas was started by ex-EA/Activision/Sony devs. But Mozilla partnered with PlayCanvas to open source the engine and later launch Firefox's WebGL 2 support with the After the Flood demo: http://aftertheflood.playcanvas.com/

Ahh, thank you for the correction.

How long ago that decision were made? PlayCanvas is still here, doesn't look like it is going anywhere. For many years it existed, many people resist, some don't. But business is still here. And community grows. Portfolio of commercial projects as well.

A bit over a year ago now, so at least that much time has passed. It looked like a very good product then, looks like a very good product now. When I spoke to their support I was actually helped out by their CTO so I always felt it was a pretty rooted place.

But, at that time it didn’t meet our requirements.

I’m a game dev looking for something like PlayCanvas can you recommend alternatives? What did your studio end up going with?

I think they ended up using Phaser. I left before they actually released a game with that new stack. As mentioned below the cons are that you will need to invest more in making your tooling and it’s way harder for anyone whose not a programmer to use it. The pros were that it was very easy to work with, HTML first, and had a long enough track record to have ironed out a lot of common developer problems.

I recall our unity engineer quite liked Defold, which had an integrated builder tool, but for some reason the lead dev didn’t want to go with it.

I don’t want to be throwing shade on Play Canvas though, it’s possible if we did the same assessment today we would have gone with that engine.

what did you guys end up using?

I also went down that route and opted for three.js The downside is no decent game engine nor IDE, you end up writing your own engine and tooling.

Same cons that we came up with too. Which means it’s that’s much harder for anyone who isn’t a developer to make contributions to things like level design.

I left the company before that decision really formalized itself but I think the lead dev was leaning towards using Phaser. I believe they’re using that now at least.

We had been using Unity for a long time but when the company decided pivot to HTML, we kept running into performance issues for for web (which left the Unity developer we had hired in a pretty awkward position).

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