Wonderland Engine 1.5.2 - Audio Encoding and Bugfixes

Audio encoding, quality-of-life changes, and stability improvements.

Audio Encoding 

Audio clip resources were added in 1.5.0. They significantly improved the deployment workflow, but were still missing an important feature: Audio encoding!

A frequent download-size culprit in 3D, WebAR, and WebXR projects is the size of the audio files: often WAV, or FLAC files slip into deployments and make up a surprising portion of the package size.

Wonderland now compresses any raw audio resources (.wav and .flac) to OPUS — a modern royalty-free audio standard supported by all major browsers. The resulting stream is serialized into a WEBM container.

Files are compressed to 96kbit/s VBR, roughly comparable in quality to MP3 at 192kbit/s. This means OPUS is higher quality at smaller sizes.

We may expose compression settings in a future version. If you supply pre-compressed audio files, Wonderland Editor will not transcode them. You are free to use audio with a different quality or codec altogether.

Editor Plugins 

For plugin packages, we are moving package.json metadata to help Wonderland Editor find plugins:

{
    // ...
    "wonderlandengine": {
        "plugins": [
            {
                "name": "My Plugin A",
                "main": "src/plugin-a.mjs"
            },
            {
                "name": "My Plugin B",
                "main": "src/plugin-b.mjs"
            }
        ]
    },
    // ...
}

Changelog 

Editor

• Improve pipeline blending default values. When enabling blending on a new pipeline, you now get standard alpha blending out of the box.
• Transcode uncompressed audio clip resources to Opus
• Update VR project template to use audio clips
• Move exposure from HDR settings to a per-view property
• Restore JS component property order in UI to match declaration order
• Improve handling of JS component property type changes
• Fix custom localization terms
• Support more mimetypes in web server
• Fix gzipping of deploy folder to work on first package
• Fix occasional crash when creating materials or reordering pipelines
• Add zappar-publish-plugin to Plugins view

Engine

• Update to latest Slug Library
• Apply exposure in all standard shaders, even if Bloom is disabled

JS API

• Remove extraneous localization .bin file fetch
• Add ViewComponent.exposure