Wonderland Engine’s step towards enabling jawdropping project scopes for WebXR projects on the web.

Previous Releases 

Physics and Stability (0.8) 

Main focus for 0.8.0 was Physics. We have integrated the NVidia PhysX open source physics engine to enable an enterprise-grade physics solution on the web.

Additionally, we started initial experiments with post-processing and will be releasing an experimental bloom effect with a basic tone mapper for HDR rendering that is required for it.

Bugfixes and Size Optimizations 

With new features come a lot of feedback and issue reports. Additionally, adding features increases the size of the runtime binary, which delays the “first draw” of your projects. These patch releases will be implementing optimizations to further reduce the size of the Wonderland Engine runtime.

We usually also add smaller convenience and workflow improvements to the Wonderland Engine editor.

Performance Optimizations 

Minor releases always come with small optimizations, for 0.8.x, these were JavaScript API garbage collection and skinned mesh focused, but also general scene graph optimizations and even optimizations for the editor.

Rendering (0.9) 

Wonderland Engine has been designed to be performant on the web. And with great success, as focus had so far been to radically optimize rendering.

This gave us a great base for implementing more advanced graphics rendering features:

• Real-time Shadows for spot, sun and spot lights
• PBR: More realistic light calculations for surface materials.
• Slug Text Rendering: Game-industry standard text rendering, crisp up close, legible from afar.
• Multi-font support: Multiple fonts in a single scene, all rendering with a single draw call.
• Texture Streaming: Many more and super high resolution textures, intelligently streamed in and out of the GPU for more detail in your scenes.
• Full-screen Draws: Efficient sky and background image draws

H1 2023: Extensibility, UX and Stability (1.0) 

While we aim to provide a feature set that fulfills the most common use cases, every use case has its specific challenges that a general application can not easily master.

Editor Plugins 

This version marks our initial release of a JavaScript (NodeJS) based editor plugin API, which will allow users to easily build custom UI and tools into the editor. The entire NPM ecosystem will be available to build powerful tools, from integrations with web services to auto deployments or level building and machine learning tools.

Custom Shaders 

While custom shaders have been a hidden feature for a while, we will finally mark the API as stable.

Performance and Benchmarking 

We have quite a few performance optimizations in our backlog, that are ready, but have not been sufficiently benchmarked to guarantee that they will improve performance on all devices. For this we are building out a framework for benchmarking Wonderland Engine projects and will be making it available to the Wonderland Engine community.

You can expect significant improvements to performance for every 1.0.x release.

Animation Tools 

We will be improving our support for animations with Blending and Animation State Machines, accompanied by tools in the editor to efficiently edit animations and add event tracks.

Translation Tools 

Internationalization improves the reach of any WebXR application. So easily work with existing translation software, we will implement export and import of language files for strings in the editor.