Planning out Phaser 3 dev and Phaser 2.6 Updates
After a highly enjoyable week away from the computer, there was easily two weeks worth of things that needed doing on my return!
First of all I set about going through the new Phaser GitHub issues and Pull Requests. There weren't too many new ones thankfully, so I mostly spent this week doing house-keeping tasks: knocking off a few new bugs that had been reported, and planning out the roadmap for Phaser over the next few months.
Phaser 2.6.2
Next week I shall release Phaser 2.6.2. This will be a point release, as indicated by the version number. Essentially what I'm going to do is bundle together all of the bug fixes that are currently fixed in the Phaser dev branch, and then push them out as 2.6.2. This will include a few small new features, but nothing major. The idea being that we keep on-top of our approximately once-a-month release schedule. This is especially important given a few of the fixes in this build, such as the Audio Context and Graphics update ones (see the Change Log for the full list as usual)
Phaser 3.0.0
As soon as Phaser 2.6.2 is released I'll move on to Phaser 3.
Wait, what? Phaser 3? The reason for the jump is because I'm now following semver much more carefully. So all of the large internal Phaser renderer changes: multi-texture support, compressed texture support and WebGL Tilemap support, need to be released in a version larger than just a point release, and 3.0 is going to be it.
There's quite a lot more testing that needs to happen with the above features, hence the delineation between Phaser 2.x and 3.x. If you've been following our progress over the past few months, you'll know that all of these major features are now ready. So I'm hopeful that the release gap between 2.6.2 and 3.0.0 will be quite short (i.e. under a month).
Features Roadmap
A few months ago I drafted the following top-level features list for Phaser. As you can see we are quite a way through it already. As Phaser 3.x development continues, we'll knock-off more of these features, before settling down, calling it a day, and returning to work on Lazer.
▪ Weapon Plugin (completed)
▪ Advanced Group / Sprite Alignment (completed)
▪ Expand Input Manager process (completed)
▪ Path Plugin (90% completed)
▪ WebGL Tilemaps (v3.0.0)
▪ Multi Texture support (v3.0.0)
▪ Compressed Texture support (v3.0.0)
▪ Revised Main Loop (v3.0.0)
▪ Improved Texture Atlas support: rotated frames (v3.1.0)
▪ Multi-Atlas support (v3.1.0)
▪ Bitmap Fonts, Sprite Sheets, Tilesets able to be stored in Texture Atlas (v3.1.0)
▪ Updated Animation system (v3.2.0)
I'd hope that by the end of September you'll see all of the above done. I don't guarantee that of course, and we'll still stay on-top of bug reports, but given our track record so far I feel it's more than achievable.
After a highly enjoyable week away from the computer, there was easily two weeks worth of things that needed doing on my return!
First of all I set about going through the new Phaser GitHub issues and Pull Requests. There weren't too many new ones thankfully, so I mostly spent this week doing house-keeping tasks: knocking off a few new bugs that had been reported, and planning out the roadmap for Phaser over the next few months.
Phaser 2.6.2
Next week I shall release Phaser 2.6.2. This will be a point release, as indicated by the version number. Essentially what I'm going to do is bundle together all of the bug fixes that are currently fixed in the Phaser dev branch, and then push them out as 2.6.2. This will include a few small new features, but nothing major. The idea being that we keep on-top of our approximately once-a-month release schedule. This is especially important given a few of the fixes in this build, such as the Audio Context and Graphics update ones (see the Change Log for the full list as usual)
Phaser 3.0.0
As soon as Phaser 2.6.2 is released I'll move on to Phaser 3.
Wait, what? Phaser 3? The reason for the jump is because I'm now following semver much more carefully. So all of the large internal Phaser renderer changes: multi-texture support, compressed texture support and WebGL Tilemap support, need to be released in a version larger than just a point release, and 3.0 is going to be it.
There's quite a lot more testing that needs to happen with the above features, hence the delineation between Phaser 2.x and 3.x. If you've been following our progress over the past few months, you'll know that all of these major features are now ready. So I'm hopeful that the release gap between 2.6.2 and 3.0.0 will be quite short (i.e. under a month).
Features Roadmap
A few months ago I drafted the following top-level features list for Phaser. As you can see we are quite a way through it already. As Phaser 3.x development continues, we'll knock-off more of these features, before settling down, calling it a day, and returning to work on Lazer.
▪ Weapon Plugin (completed)
▪ Advanced Group / Sprite Alignment (completed)
▪ Expand Input Manager process (completed)
▪ Path Plugin (90% completed)
▪ WebGL Tilemaps (v3.0.0)
▪ Multi Texture support (v3.0.0)
▪ Compressed Texture support (v3.0.0)
▪ Revised Main Loop (v3.0.0)
▪ Improved Texture Atlas support: rotated frames (v3.1.0)
▪ Multi-Atlas support (v3.1.0)
▪ Bitmap Fonts, Sprite Sheets, Tilesets able to be stored in Texture Atlas (v3.1.0)
▪ Updated Animation system (v3.2.0)
I'd hope that by the end of September you'll see all of the above done. I don't guarantee that of course, and we'll still stay on-top of bug reports, but given our track record so far I feel it's more than achievable.