Hacker News Reader

Comment by MayorOfMonkeys | Hacker News Reader

Looks cool. How was your experience with three.js? Did you check out the PlayCanvas engine: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine - it's a bit more geared towards games.

View on HN

I've experimented with PlayCanvas and the upfront load time is a deal breaker. It feels bloated. Three is impressively small (although I know it doesn't try to do nearly as much).

Phaser, on the other hand, seems alright for 2D though their docs could be better.

The docs for Phaser are a bit lacking but I found just about everything I needed by reading through the provided examples.

three.min.js: 410KB playcanvas-stable.min.js: 521KB

So 111KB difference. What would the load time difference be?

I like threejs since I want to create stuff myself rather than having a full blown engine. I never tested playcanvas but I've seen some impressive demos made with it. But I guess threejs is much more lowlevel than playcanvas, even though threejs is high level compared to raw webgl :)

You can still do your own stuff in PlayCanvas (write your own shaders, procedurally create geometry, etc etc). But there's extra stuff you get: physically based renderer, powerful chunk based shader system, point light shadows, entity-component system, and lots more besides. Definitely worth checking out. :) Sounds like you're not interested in higher level tools, but the PlayCanvas Editor is really cool too (that's on https://playcanvas.com - and it's optional). It's essentially Unity in the browser.

Sounds nice, I think I will take a look at it some day :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com