On the Cocos Creator game engine, you can now fully work with three-dimensional graphics. The authors of the platform have launched Cocos Creator 3.0, a version of the framework that combines the functions of the company’s previous 2D and 3D products.
The developers told about the changes in the official blog. According to the creators of the project, they thought about the introduction of 3D functions almost immediately after the release of the Cocos2d-x engine in 2010. For a long time their attempts remained unsuccessful, but in 2019 the company managed to launch an experimental Cocos Creator 3D. This platform formed the basis of Cocos Creator 3.0.
What appeared in Cocos Creator 3.0?
- support for 3D models in glTF 2.0 and FBX formats;
- physical rendering and lighting;
- support for modern graphics API (Vulkan and Metal) with automatic switching to OpenGL ES3 for older devices;
- materials system;
- built-in direct rendering pipeline;
- skeletal animation and target animation morphing;
- particle system on GPU;
- “baking” landscape and light maps;
- a number of other functions.
However, the developers warned that for the new version of the engine they had to redesign its entire architecture. Therefore, games created on Cocos Creator 1.X – 2.X will not work correctly in Cocos Creator 3.0. Nevertheless, you can already start making new projects on it.
The company is going to release updates for Cocos Creator 3.0 for at least two more years. Among the planned innovations are the addition of multithreaded rendering and support for augmented reality technologies for mobile platforms. Note that Cocos Creator 3.0, following its predecessors, will continue to work as a free framework with partially open source code.
Despite the fact that Cocos Creator 3.0 is suitable for the development of titles and for consoles with PC, the authors of the engine pay special attention to mobile and HTML5 games. In their opinion, the performance of modern mobile devices has not yet been revealed, and here Cocos could offer something new.
To date, more than 100 thousand projects have been made on Cocos engines. Among the major gaming companies that developed games on it, Tencent, Gameloft, Ubisoft and Square Enix were noted in particular.