Open Collective
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PixiJS and COVID Update
Published on April 14, 2020 by Matt Karl

Last week, I asked the core team on Slack how everyone was doing. All our team is spread all over the world, but everyone seemed to be feeling the stress and realities of trying to get a lot done from home with kids, work and competing personal priorities. While PixiJS v5.3.0 development has slowed a little to deal with this new reality, we have a bunch of new things that we're excited about that we'd like to share...

  • Recently, we refactored all our the GitHub labels. The primary purpose was to create a label system that was simpler, easier to use and easier to understand. Also, we hope to start offering bounties for bugs and high-value feature requests and added new labels for these things. We have a good reserve of funds on OpenCollective and want to start utilizing to address long-standing issues.
  • Working with our PixiJS community member SukantPal, we finally were able to implement high-requested cap, lineJoin and miterLimit features to Graphics strokes. These new features are coming in v5.3, but you can see a preview of it here. This is the first time we've used OpenCollective to pay a developer for PixiJS development, hopefully more to come!
  • We've been researching alternative text rendering approaches for PixiJS, including introducing better caching and reuse for Text. This is still in the early phases, but we feel like we can improve performance for a lot of use-cases. Text is still a huge bottleneck in performance and we think there's more we can do.
  • We added a new plugin for v5: HTMLText, this is a standalone plugin for users that want to do text with HTML markup.
  • TravisCI is a tool that a lot of open-source projects use for continuous integration. We are in the process of moving to GitHub Actions, which can accomplish the same things as Travis, but with greater reliability and hopefully fewer stalled builds for pull-requests.
  • Lastly, because 5.3.0 development has slowed a bit, we'll be making a patch release this week (5.2.2) to address some of the bug fixes that were added recently.

Thanks again to everyone for supporting PixiJS, your contributions are allowing us be much more responsive and accomplish lots of new things. Even though we are all struggling and it maybe some time until we're on the other side of this pandemic, we are doing our best to keep things running and as normal as we can.