Newsletter – Issue 005

🔥 Headlines

Duelyst, a turn-based strategy game that shut down in early 2020, just got open-sourced. You can still play on their staging deployment. It was coded with Cocos2d-JS, a library merged into Cocos2d-x, which is now legacy, and got merged into the cocos-engine, which you can use via Cocos Creator (are you following? 😅). Cocos Creator is a Unity-like cross-platform editor which supports TypeScript and JavaScript.

Use.GPU (GitLab repo) is a set of declarative, reactive WebGPU legos by Steven Wittens. It’s a standalone React-like library that uses JSX. Version 0.8 (Hacker News thread) brings conveniences like scenes and nodes with matrices, mesh instancing, shadow maps, visibility culling, and a new rendering pipeline. Learn more.

NYTimes released Vite and Rollup plugins to optimize 3D glTF assets. By Don McCurdy and Or Fleisher.

The results of the State of JS 2022 are available. For a TLDR, check out the tier list (Fireship video). A safe bet is still React + Vite or Next.js, but I can see Svelte gaining more traction thanks to SvelteKit this year.

⬆️ Updates

• Drei v9.52 and v9.53 – Adds <Caustics> and support for THREE.LineSegments2 in <Line>.
• PlayCanvas v1.60.0 – Adds standard material invert for gloss channels and improved WebGPU support, including directional light shadow maps. GLB imports in the Editor are coming soon.
• Phaser 3.60 Beta 18 – Updated Particle System.
• Babylon.js v5.42.0
• PixiJS v7.1.0

✍️ Content

• 🎬 Cocos Creator Gets a Major Upgrade by Gamefromscratch.
• 🎬 Porting Unreal Scenes to Browser with PlayCanvas by Leonidas Maliokas.
• ✍️ RTS Devlog #8: How To Beat Lag (Construct engine) by Ashley Gullen
• ✍️ Rendering 100k spheres, instantiating and draw calls by Daniel Velasquez.

✨ Games & Demos

• 🎮 Summer Afternoon by Vicente Lucendo. A very charming and relaxing multiplayer experiment. 👒
• 🎮 Keyboard Heroes by console_buche. Guitar Hero meets speed typing. 🤘
• 🎮 Candy Riot by Long Story Short Games. A cute and spooky game that came out for Halloween. 🎃

See more on the ✨ Games & Demos page or 🎮 WebGamer.io.

💬 From our Discord

We had our second Discord video meetup on January 12th:

• Renegade Lab Studios presented Exiles, their upcoming multiplayer futuristic vehicular combat game.
• Anslo explained the procedural terrain generation techniques used in Slow Roads.
• Trezy presented his upcoming Debug puzzle game (custom engine), based on his js13k 2020 game: Not Found.

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