It gives me great pleasure to announce that Phaser 2.3.0 was released today.
It marks the second release of 2015 and is easily one of our most significant updates for a while. Although the API changes involved are actually quite minimal we've given Phaser a serious Spring clean under the hood.
We removed thousands of lines of code. You now get to decide what Phaser bundles in or not.
Traditionally we have had something of a 'kitchen sink' issue with Phaser. As we thought of great new features to give you we just added them in. And like too much of a good thing they contributed to an ever growing file size.
So two of the biggest changes 2.3.0 has is an internal shift to using Game Object components, and allowing you to exclude features in your own custom builds. The new build system lets you selectively exclude features from being bundled in: for example if your game doesn't need Gamepad or Keyboard support you can now tell Phaser to skip those parts entirely.
This tutorial explains the process in detail. But the end result is that thanks to these changes we've both managed to remove thousands of lines of code and let you decide what Phaser contains. The minimum build size is now just 83KB minified and gzipped and that's still including both the WebGL and Canvas renderers.
Even though we've been cutting down on size we still managed to pack a whole load of great new features in. For example the new spacial sorting added to Arcade Physics allows for incredible speed increases when dealing with densely populated game worlds.
The Loader also received a complete overhaul. It now offers full parallel asset loading, sync points and better use of xhr. The Tilemap system was upgraded to support new Tiled 0.11 editor features and even Audio has been been enhanced, adding in better marker and loop handling.
The extensive Change Log contains all the gory details.
2.3.0 is already available on npm, jsDelivr and of course GitHub.
Please tell us if you create anything with it! Drop us an email or a tweet and we'll happily feature your project on this site, where it could be seen by thousands of visitors daily.
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