Posted December 02, 2020 by Cocos Technologies
#2D #3D #AR #PC #ios #android #Facebook Games #mini games #WeChat games #Huawei AppGallery #HTML5 #Mac #game engine #TikTok #typescript
After nearly half a year of hard work, the engine team brings a new version, Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview version.
Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview integrates all the original 2D and 3D products’ functions, brings many major updates, and is the beginning of the new future of Cocos Creator. At the same time, Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview also continues Cocos’s advantages of being lightweight and efficient in 2D categories and provides an efficient development experience for 3D heavy games. We will vigorously advance on the foundation of 3.0, with a sincere attitude and dedicated spirit, steadfastly improve the product experience, and benefit all developers.
To ensure the smooth transition of an existing Cocos Creator 2.4 project, we will use 2.4 as the LTS (long-term support) version and provide continuous updates for the next two years! In 2021, 2.4 will continue to be updated to provide bug fixes and new mini-game platform support to ensure the successful launch of your project; in 2022, we will continue to provide developers with the key to 2.4 bug fixes to ensure the smooth operation of online games! Therefore,
Although we do not recommend projects under development, especially projects about to go live, upgrade to 3.0, we will still be launching a 2.x resource import tool in the 3.0 official version. This tool will support the perfect import of old project resources and the auxiliary import of codes. Code-assisted import will convert Javascript into Typescript, add component type declarations, attribute declarations, and function declarations. The references for components in the scene will be preserved. The code inside the function will be imported in the form of comments, reducing the developer’s upgrade difficulty. If an existing project needs to be upgraded for special reasons and encounter technical or workload difficulties, you can also contact our Community Evangelist for assistance!
The original Cocos Creator 3D, as a branch version of Cocos Creator, has become battle-tested in China for a year and has successfully launched major projects such as Star Battle and The Strongest Magic Fighter! After Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview is released, Cocos Creator 3D will also be included in Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview, and existing 1.2 projects can be directly upgraded. Therefore, Cocos Creator 3D will not release an independent version in the future.
This Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview version is close to the official version in terms of functionality and can be used for new project establishment and feature pre-research. The next official version will be released in February and will further improve the performance and fix the problems to ensure that everyone’s new projects can proceed smoothly.
This Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview version uses a new future-oriented engine architecture, which will bring high-performance, data-oriented, and load-balanced renderers to the engine, and seamlessly support Vulkan & Metal multi-backend rendering. In the future, it will also support mobile VR/AR and some Host platform. For a detailed introduction to the Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview, please go to Official Website Update Instructions.
The integrated editor brings a lightweight and easy-to-use creative experience. Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview is refactored, expanded, and upgraded on the editor framework that Cocos Creator 2.x has been using for many years.
After the build, Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview will cache most of the build content, including resources, compressed textures, automatic atlas, engine code, etc. If there is no change in the subsequent build, the cached content will be used directly to speed up the build and improve efficiency.
The build and release will be carried out in the form of build tasks, and the configuration, status, log, etc., of each build, will be saved, which is convenient for switching build tasks and viewing historical configurations.
The generation stage of each mini game platform is extracted, allowing you to modify the content of the file after construction to regenerate rpk/cpk. At the same time, it can support adding construction hooks before and after compilation to customize the construction process.
Like 2.4, Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview also uses Asset Bundle as a resource modularization tool. Developers can build textures, scripts, scenes, and other resources into multiple Asset Bundles and then load them on demand during the game running process, thereby reducing the time required to download and load the game for the first time. Asset Bundles can be placed as needed. For example, they can be placed in remote servers, local, or sub-packages of small game platforms, or they can be reused across projects to load Asset Bundles in sub-projects.
You can set the Splash Screen during construction to display a cutscene before the game starts to optimize the first screen start speed.
GameView is a game running panel embedded in the editor. Developers can run the game directly in the editor without opening the browser preview. In addition to a more seamless development experience, you can also debug and modify element states in real-time through the scene editor or other panels during the game running process, making game development more efficient!
Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview has a more powerful plug-in system. Almost all function modules of the editor are in the form of plug-ins. You can quickly create your own plug-ins in the extended menu to achieve the effects you want. Also, Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview provides an Extension Manager, which can easily manage all extension plug-ins’ operations and uninstallations.
Plug-ins can use IPC messages to communicate with other plug-ins or editors to quickly and easily use the capabilities provided in the editor. Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview also provides a message manager, which can clearly see the functions currently provided in the editor, reducing the threshold for plug-in development.
The Animation Editor is an important module that we have been continuously optimizing. In addition to standard displacement, rotation, zoom animation, and sequence frame animation, this animation system also supports driving arbitrary component attributes and user-defined attributes, plus it can be edited at will. The time curve and innovative movement trajectory editing functions allow content producers to produce various dynamic effects without writing a line of code and drive the game logic at will.
In addition to normal operations, the Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview Animation Editor also provides the following shortcut operations to help game developers achieve the desired content:
Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview provides a convenient terrain system to draw terrain textures quickly. Terrain editing mainly includes three major functions: Manage, Sculpt, and Paint. Supports both Normal Map and PBR materials.
Baking is the process of generating lightmaps by pre-calculating the influence of light sources on objects and applying them to the scene, which can greatly improve the picture performance of static scenes without losing operational efficiency.
A shortcut is provided to modify the engine macro configuration. The configured macro will take effect during the preview and build. At the same time, the default value of the current macro configuration will be updated with the configuration of the custom engine.
Supports adding compressed texture preset configuration for quick configuration of texture compression method. After setting presets for pictures, you can also directly modify the presets to update the corresponding textures in batches, which greatly facilitates the project’s overall management.
Cocos Creator 2.4 is very powerful in 2D rendering, while Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview allows developers to make more beautiful 3D games. We have integrated the advantages of the two in 3.0 and fully support various functions of 2D and 3D.
As the core module of the game engine, the rendering system plays a vital role and directly determines the content that the game can output to the player. An excellent rendering system must also take into account various platforms and smooth the differences between platforms. The rendering system of Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview, from architecture to design, is aimed at future-oriented, high-performance, and cross-platform, which greatly improves rendering capabilities and robustness.
In the 3D world, light and shadow have always been vital components. They can enrich the environmental performance, and good quality shadows can achieve a fake effect and make the whole world more three-dimensional.
The particle system is the basis for the special effects of game engines. It can be used to simulate natural phenomena such as fire, smoke, water, clouds, snow, and fallen leaves, and it can also be used to simulate abstract visual effects such as luminous trajectories and speed lines. Good particle effects can make the game more stunning.
As a resource, material determines the rendering effect of the attached object. Almost all the rendered effects in the game are inseparable from the material. As a basic module, the material system provides a solid foundation for the superstructure.
The Cocos Effect based on YAML and GLSL designed by Cocos is a single-source embedded domain-specific language(single-source embedded DSL). The YAML part declares the flow control list, and the GLSL part declares the actual Shader fragments. These two parts of content The above complement each other and together constitute a complete rendering process description.
Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview has a built-in general animation system to realize animation based on keyframes. We can easily produce animation clip resources in the editor, such as through the animation editor or the animation clip resources already contained in some external resources. In this case, we only need to organize these animation clips and control the playback according to our wishes.
The project development of Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview has fully turned to TypeScript, and JavaScript is no longer supported in the project. Support for TypeScript has been further improved in Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview:
@integer
, @float
, @string
, @boolean
, @type
etc.Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview continues the 2.x UI design and further optimizes and upgrades, including the following:
The engine provides the UIStaticBatchComponent component. UIs that do not require frequent changes can use this component to cache rendering data, reducing rendering consumption, and improving performance.
Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview currently has a built-in lightweight collision detection system built-in and a physics engine cannon.js with physical simulation and a powerful bullet compiled into asm.js/WASM version ammo.js. It provides users with an efficient, componentized workflow and convenient usage.
ammo.js
, cannon.js
and more lightweight builtin physical.Powerful and easy-to-use editing functions, easy-to-use and streamlined editing functions, perfect platform support, png, and full-featured, convenient and easy-to-use editing functions, making Cocos Creator 3.0 Preview the first choice for more and more developers to develop games. We will continue to improve features and platform services to help developers enter the game market more easily and develop successful games at lower costs.
Please feel free to submit feedback to us via our official forums if you encounter problems or issues.