Do not use uncompressed textures
[Hint] You probably are! And that could be holding your WebGL app back in terms of performance.
PixiJS Picture Kit
Ivan Popleyshev has been working hard upgrading the libraries he has authored to PixiJS 6. The next one up is PixiJS Picture Kit – a shader-based implementation for blending modes that WebGL doesn’t actively support. Apart from blending, the “backdrop” texture it exposes can be used for other kinds of filtering. Blend Modes This section goes over blend modes and how they work in WebGL. The blend mode defines how colors output by the fragment shader are combined with the […]
PixiJS Layers Kit
Ivan Popelyshev recently migrated the PixiJS Layers Kit to be compatible with PixiJS 6. I helped him also document the @pixi/layers API here. This package introduces an interesting concept – making the order in which items in your scene tree render separate from the tree’s hierarchy. It allows you to change the display order of display objects by assigning layers. Let’s start with a scenario in which this might be helpful – notes that can be dragged using handles that […]
UBOs
Thanks to Mat Grove’s work, PixiJS 6.1.0 will ship with support for Uniform Buffer Objects, a WebGL 2 optimization to make uniform uploads faster. Context UBOs are handles to GPU buffers that store uniform data. They can be attached to a shader in a single step, without needing to upload each uniform field individually. If you share uniforms between multiple shaders, this can be used to reduce uploads of relatively static data. Theoretically, you can optimize filters with UBOs. The […]
Federated Events API
PixiJS 6.1.0 will ship with an experimental UI event infrastructure that provides a much more robust and DOM-compatible solution than the incumbent interaction plugin. This change made it through PixiJS’ RFC 7071 and merged in PR 7213. I named it the “Federated Events API.” It’s federated because you can create multiple event boundaries and override their logic for parts of your scene. Each event boundary only controls events for the scene below them – not unlike a federation. Context I developed the Federated Events API […]
PixiJS Tilemap Kit 3
In my effort to bring tighter integration to the PixiJS ecosystem, I’m upgrading external PixiJS packages and working towards lifting them to the standard of the main project. @pixi/tilemap 3 is the first package in this process. Yes, I’ve republished pixi-tilemap as @pixi/tilemap. Here, I want to cover the new, leaner API that @pixi/tilemap 3 brings to the table. This package by Ivan Popleyshev gives you an optimized rectangular tilemap implementation you can use to render a background for your […]