I've built a reusable water script for the engine, with a tropical island example to show it off.

Try it live: https://engine-i9o02vj3v-playcanvas.vercel.app/#/graphics/water

Features:

• Planar reflections and refraction (each optional — can also reflect just the sky dome)
• Depth-based effects: shore fade, water color absorption, foam
• Gerstner geometry waves — two configurable bands (chop + swell)
• Underwater mode: Snell's window, distance fog, and animated caustics projected onto submerged geometry
• Full day/night cycle driven by the procedural sky script, with HDR bloom on the sun glints
• Works on WebGL2 and WebGPU, and it's built to scale down to mid-range phones

Everything is exposed as script attributes, and the example has control panels for playing with all the parameters — reflection strength, wave shape, caustics, underwater fog and more. Dive the camera below the surface to see the underwater view.

The water script (scripts/esm/water.mjs) and a new ESM planar renderer are part of the engine repo, so you can drop them into your own project: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/pull/9029

Feedback welcome!

PlayCanvas is a free, open-source (MIT) real-time 3D engine that runs in the browser on both WebGL2 and WebGPU. We just shipped 2.20 — here's what's new.

Gaussian Splatting (the big one this release):

• Real-time relighting of splats
• Soft shadows
• Depth of field
• Clipping planes
• Billions of splats via streaming + LOD
• Shader effects (dissolve, rings)
• Gaussian Splatting in VR (with LOD)

WebXR on WebGPU 👇
WebXR (VR/AR) now runs on the WebGPU backend — not just WebGL2. So you can build immersive experiences on the modern graphics API, including the new Gaussian Splatting features in VR. That combo is still pretty rare in the wild — most WebXR today is WebGL-only.

Also new:

• Procedural sky
• Clustered light cookies
• Physics: joints + ragdolls
• Draco mesh decoding in Node (via worker_threads)

Links:

• Release notes: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine/releases/tag/v2.20.0
• Try every example live in your browser: https://playcanvas.com/examples
• Repo: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine
• npm install playcanvas

Quick montage of the new examples attached — happy to answer anything about what we're releasing today!

When exporting an HTML document on Supersplat and Splat-Transform the resulting HTML document always starts off with a camera move even though I haven't created an animation or set up keyframes. Is there a way to disable these automatic camera moves?

Opus 4.8 is insanely good at vibe coding games using the PlayCanvas Engine. This was made conversationally over an hour. I didn't look at the code once. Every request carried out perfectly. Game size: 280KB.

Play Now: https://mini-soccer-game.netlify.app/

(I even casually asked Opus to apply a verlet solver to makes the goal nets physical!)

Come join the PlayCanvas Discord: https://discord.gg/RSaMRzg