Introducing Gladius 0.2

Physics example from the galleryToday we are proud to release the next version of our open-source Javascript game engine,Gladius 0.2. For this release, we focused on making the API more intuitive and improving modularity.

 

The driving goal for these changes is to make it easy for developers to customize the engine for their projects and to share their own engine plug-ins with the Gladius community.

 

Community-driven

Gladius is an experimental, community-driven Mozilla project, and seeing more people join is a great source of energy and motivation for us. For example,Chris Stromjumped into Gladius a few weeks ago  and has been writing a great blog series about his experiences. Chris is helping us identify areas for improvement in the API and spurred us to fix up some outdated documentation to make it easier for new developers to start using the engine. We also have an awesome start on high-leveldocumentation for Gladius thanks toMichael Kelly.

 

Engine plug-in support, updated documentation and more

The biggest update you’ll notice in this release is support for engine plug-ins through a new extension framework. It’s now much easier to add new functionality to the engine by writing an extension yourself, or by loading an existing extension from github or the Web.

 

We’ve also updated READMEs and new examples that will help you get started with Gladius. They demonstrate how to load the engine and illustrate functionality in the default extensions. The default extensions, along with all the examples, are availablehere. See the examples in action in our newgallery.

 

Get involved

We would love for you to help with Gladius by trying it out yourself or by helping to build out the project. We’re available in#games on irc.mozilla.org to help you get started, and we’re especially keen to feature more community work in thegallery.
Some specific areas where you can get involved:
  • Create a new example or make an existing example awesome
  • Contribute to our growing set of documentation
  • Put together a simple game

You can get started by heading over to github and cloning therepository or downloading thearchive.

What’s next

Our next release will focus on making it easier to get started with Gladius by building out more documentation and examples, and by continuing to improve API usability.

—Alan Kligman,Dan Mosedale andDavid Perit, on behalf of all the Gladius contributors