Open Collective
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New Year, New Projects
Published on December 28, 2020 by Matt Karl

It's been a struggle of a year for everyone as evidenced by our lack of updates. While the project is humming along, everyone on the team has been feeling rather stretched thin. We are hoping that a new year will also bring a renewed energy for PixiJS. In particular, there are several projects coming up that are exciting us that we hope to share more information on soon. Here's a quick summary:

  • PixiJS Animate is getting a refresh! This Adobe Animate extension was introduced several years ago and hasn't gotten much love since. Because of a generous donation from PBS KIDS, we are dusting off this plugin and modernizing both the runtime and the publishing. In particular, we are taking advantage of tweening information, so we can export easing timelines, not just frame-by-frame animation. This will make animations much smaller and with better support time-scaling. Core team member Andrew Start is heading this effort.
  • We are working on a new package called @pixi/dom. This package will provide plugin support for running PixiJS in non-DOM based environments, like WebWorkers and Node.js (server-side-rendering) by consolidating all the DOM-based API calls in one place. Until now, developers have mostly had to hack, fork and monkey-patch Pixi to work off browser. We hope this will provide a paved-path for developers for large scale projects wishing to render in alternative environments.
  • Version 6.0.0 is almost here. That's not a typo! We were working toward 5.4.0 with prereleases when the team realized that it would be better for us to make a major version change. While very little about the library changed, with the new TypeScript typings, we didn't want to be super disruptive for users of TypeScript. Otherwise, the experience using the library should be the same.
  • Core team member Shukant Pal posted a RFC (request for comment) on GitHub Discussion. Our goal it to work on revising the interaction event system in PixiJS to support more DOM-like features such as bubbling and capture. We hope that this new event system will be more maintainable and more flexible for developers as well.
  • Lastly, since the summer, we've been working with Rob Morris, who has generously agreed to help us craft our first iteration of user-guides for PixiJS. These are official documentation for things like best practices, library concepts, and getting started. Our first draft is nearly done and we hope to merge these guides with the pixijs.com website in 2021.

Thank you everyone for your dedicated support. We could not have done any of the above without your help. Please have a happy, healthy and safe New Year.