Anim State Graph: Node-Based Animation Editor for WebGL | Hacker News Reader

Anim State Graph: Node-Based Animation Editor for WebGL

blog.playcanvas.com

141 pointsovenchips19 comments

I've recently tested 20 different webgl libraries. I was looking for anything with hierarchical scenes that performance-wise would be as fast as hand tuned vanilla webgl. Only play canvas came close but it has one annoying feature. There is IDE with the same name (from the same company) and every time I searched how to do X in playcanvas, first 10 items in search were always for ide (e.g. go to menu x, choose y, move slider to z), not library (use function fooBar(x,y,z)). This made development extremely annoying so I abandoned it and went vanilla webgl.

They should rename library to something else (libcanvas or something).

Imagine you are deep in the "zone", solving difficult problem, you write search query while still desperately trying to stay in the zone and every time you press enter Google stabs you in the back. It was hell.

Thanks for the feedback! Good to hear that you experienced good performance from PlayCanvas in your tests. The majority of PlayCanvas users to opt for the Editor rather than using the Engine standalone, so yeah, the developer resources are biased a bit in that direction. But we are working hard to rebalance things towards the engine. For example, we're about to release a new engine-only examples browser app that's really cool. Key an eye out for it. :)

This seems really tone-deaf to me, to sorta market a mostly unrelated feature that's upcoming when a developer just decided against using your product for practical reasons.

I suppose it's nice to know that you've at least acknowledged that there's an issue, but it seems weird to take so lightly someone using your product, finding it so difficult to deal with that they dropped it, and then even dropping an emoticon at the end.

Just my two cents.

No problem! Thanks for your feedback too. The examples browser is really designed to be a vehicle to learn and experiment with the engine run-time. It should be a great resource for engine-only developers - so hopefully the dvh will find it interesting. We've done a ton of work on the API reference recently too (https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/api/). It's a huge task, but yeah, we're working night and day to make the runtime easier to work with.

It seems like none of that work solves the underlying issue that was raised which was specifically search ambiguity between the library and the editor. Any response should discuss the possibility to changing the library name or creating search friendly alternative name (such the use of "golang" to alow easy searching for content related to the highly ambiguously searchable Go programming language.

I've kicked off a new forum thread on this topic: https://forum.playcanvas.com/t/improving-search-results-for-... Excited to get peoples' thoughts on it.

It's a marketing thing - the engine is free and open source, the editor is not.

This seems to be mostly about character animation.

I wish people would prefix "character" on the word animation when this is the case. I've noticed "procedural animation" almost entirely means "procedural character animation". As someone who's interested in animation but not particularly interested in character animation it makes searching and browsing for stuff slightly annoying.

I was excited until I read your comment. I agree that’s a very important distinction.

The examples are for characters, sure, but state machine + blended animations can be used for all sorts of things.

I do agree on the jade regarding the shorthand for character animation. Especially when seeing so many (mostly indie but might just be exposure bias on my part) games ignoring environmental, UI, and camera animation even when they have good animation on their characters.

PlayCanvas is an amazing engine that is totally underrated.

Indeed, one of the best development experience for Web first development.

I really wanted to like it, but I couldn't figure out a good way to use their (web-only) scene editor while keeping and editing source code on my own machine...

You just need this:

https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync

Is it only useful for something like a video game?

No, it's used for AR/VR, playable ads, 3D configurators, automotive, arch viz and more. See:

https://github.com/playcanvas/awesome-playcanvas#awesome-pla...

Probably for a reason of having web editor. I tried to like it, but doing Unity or Unreal editor like things in a browser is just exhausting.

Is this designed for games only?

If I wanted to create an interactive-type web experience like Adult Swim's Singles series (made with WebGL), could I do that with this tool?

https://www.adultswim.com/music/singles-2018/3) - initial load takes some time unfortunately

No, it's also designed for developers building AR/VR, playable ads, 3D configurators, architectural visualizations and more. Basically, if you want to build and publish any WebGL content, PlayCanvas has your back. The 'Awesome List' has a selection of interesting use cases: https://github.com/playcanvas/awesome-playcanvas#awesome-pla...

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