Excited to share that the latest Episode of the Babylon Chronicles is live! Links below.
This episode is a pretty special one because we get to celebrate the release of version 5 of the Babylon Editor. Most importantly however, we get to spend time celebrating the incredible work done by @julien-moreau for over a decade to bring it life!
Please join me in watching it and thanking Julien for the incredible work he continues to do for this community and platform! You’re a superstar Julien!
We mentioned there is contributors today in the Editor v5 project but I did not mention their names. Of course BIG THANKS to @Soullnik and @yuripourre for helping me and joining the adventure
“…BabylonJS is a fully featured game engine”!? Wait… what!? Since when? Lost me there…
Oh how I’ve been mislead… I came for a renderer and end up with a “fully featured game engine“…
Don’t get me wrong but… PlayCanvas.com is a fully featured web game engine ( games from day one, super powerful editor, all open source too, even the editor)… for a long time now.
Don’t get me wrong I love BJS but hey… I feel I’ve been baith and switched ( please don’t come back to me saying something like “ you can use it solely as a rendering engine…” because you can do the same with a ton of other rendering engines out there including PC. Don’t want to get anyone angry/nervous at product level but by far PlayCanvas is a ‘got to’ for someone not a coder for 3D game dev on the web ( and ON the web, no downloads needed),or even ThreeJS.
I was hoping to see more investment on making the renderer capable of target native consoles ( like XBOX, Playstation, Nintendo Switch etc.) and keep the focus on code and performance.
If you want a game engine that will boost productivity go to Cocos, Defold, or what the hell, Godot.
I personally came for BJS because of the code not the editor stuff and would hate to see it go that route. ( Great work from Julien )
Well you are entitled to your opinion of course but I created it to be a game engine:) It was used by several games by the way.
I do not want to debate about vocabulary but I wanted it to be a game engine (hence the collisions for instance) but without editor. I wanted a code centric game engine
@One_Flag Thanks for your thoughts here. As you can imagine, a community of our size has a wide variety of different perspectives on this subject. Yours is absolutely valuable and appreciated as are many others.
To your question of how long has Babylon been a “fully featured game engine?” @Deltakosh mentioned, this has been true since Babylon’s inception. However let me provide a little more context.
On the core dev team our objective is simple and clear. To provide one of the most powerful, beautiful, simple, and open web rendering platforms out there. For some people that means a platform that is as close to the metal as possible. They want raw power, not fluff….performance not features. For others it’s give the opposite….give me everything that Unity and Unreal can do and more….make my game for me. And there is a wide spectrum of perspectives in between.
Forgive the simple analogy, but let’s think about buying a car. Some people want a car with the best power under the hood…something that when you put your foot on the gas it goes super fast…and they don’t care about anything else. Other people want bells and whistles that make the driving experience feel easier or smoother or better. On Babylon, we want to make a GREAT car.
This starts with building a great powertrain (rendering). That is the foundation of the car. Rendering performance and capability is there since the beginning and has always been a priority. We also want to offer people bells and whistles to make the driving (development) experience as good as possible.
So the rendering that you want is there, it’s foundational. We’ve built everything else on top of that. Our hope and goal is to provide a platform that meets your needs and ALSO meets the needs of others.
Forgive me for sticking with the analogy: No one car is perfect for everyone, but we’d certain like to provide a car that’s meets the needs for as many drivers as possible.
BabylonJS is not just a renderer like ThreeJS for example. Yes, its base is a 3D WebGL/WebGPU rendering engine, but the team has added a whole bunch of bricks around it: physics, collisions, animation, GUI, audio, particles, pathfinding (via plugins), import/export of formats… With all this, you have a foundation that covers the majority of the needs of a game engine.
And personally, I hate PlayCanvas, so describing it as a must-have, absolutely not.
I prefer an editor that uses the Babylon engine for its power, simplicity, reliability, and many other reasons than any other rendering engine.
I’ve also been doing an editor for more than 10 years by the way. I started using Babylon for exactly that purpose, to have a publisher to create a game easily, because creating a game just with code is utopian. All the great video game creators have tools, various publishers… And Babylon is perfect as a choice for web gaming.
@PirateJC Thank you for taking your time here and for all your hard work on BJS.
@Deltakosh “Well you are entitled to your opinion“ - lucky me!
I fell I am may be burning some bridges here
I love BJS. I would not change my mind to move to any other rendering engine ( and only I and God knows how many I’ve tried, PlayCanvas included).
Code centric, future proof, excellent engineering and and backwards compatibility. Keep it this way!
TLDR;
I am an idiot that believes the browser will be home for a AAA game someday ( dreams dreams dreams…)
I’ve been a fully dedicated HTML5 game dev ( Software Engineer) for over a decade and I have over 25 years of professional experience in multiple distinct areas . Not an easy path if you consider my location/background ( nobody cares I get it)… but hey… haven’t given up yet! And BJS is one of the keys to keep going!
Final statement. BJS has been way more than a rendering engine for me. Has been a school to learn and put to practice so many things related to the rendering. I won’t ever try to describe all of them here. So one last thing. Thank you BJS team! Keep pushing it.
( please don’t come back to me saying something like “ you can use it solely as a rendering engine…” because you can do the same with a ton of other rendering engines out there including PC. Don’t want to get anyone angry/nervous at product level but by far PlayCanvas is a ‘got to’ for someone not a coder for 3D game dev on the web ( and ON the web, no downloads needed),or even ThreeJS.
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