Insane Graphic And New Upgrades Make Cocos Creator 3.8 Incredible

Cocos Creator has been iterating for nine years, and its mature and stable visual editor has greatly improved developer productivity.

But this is not only an era of production speed. Production efficiency is not enough. As a mobile-first cross-platform engine, the Cocos Engine has chosen: Everything! Significant R&D resources have been invested to enhance rendering while always paying close attention to post-release runtime performance, power consumption, and stability (such as runtime performance, package size, load speed, memory overhead, power usage, system and platform compatibility, etc.). 

Also, to achieve maximum performance on native and non-native platforms, the Cocos Engine team built a dual-core engine architecture to ensure "native" performance on every platform.

• C++ High-Performance Core: When released as native applications, the engine runs with core libraries written in C++ to ensure optimal performance.
• Web3D Core: When publishing as a web / mini-game application, the engine uses a Web3D core written in TypeScript to ensure the smallest engine package and the least code redundancy.

After nine major updates for Cocos Creator version 3, 3.8 finally completed this dual-kernal engine architecture, enabling games and applications made by Cocos engine to have good performance, memory footprint, power consumption, high stability, and compatibility on native, web, and mini game platforms.

Based on these core advantages, Cocos engine have built more and more great 3D features so that it can serve in many industries besides gaming, such as automotive, XR, digital marketing, and so on. Democratizing of gaming technologies will bring more room for the growth of the Cocos engine and the developers who choose it.

At the same time, the open source project of the Cocos engine and the extensibility we built around it also allows projects to have full control on optimization, stability and flexibility.

Next, let's have a quick tour the updates in Cocos Creator 3.8.

If you want a full review of the developer notes, they are available in our release notes on our forums.

Custom Render Pipeline with Post-Processing

Cocos Creator 3.8 adds a new post-process pipeline, so developers can quickly achieve their desired post-effects according to the project's needs and improve the project's quality.

At the same time, Cocos Creator also has many commonly needed post-effects built into the engine so that developers can use directly out of the box.

Such as anti-aliasing TAA + FXAA, super-resolution FSR, BLOOM, HBAO, LUT, etc.

Rendering Algorithm And Advanced Material Updates

In addition to standard rendering capabilities such as PBR materials, HDR rendering, real-time shading and shadows, reflection probes, light probes, and lightmap baking, the Cocos engine also provides capabilities such as anisotropic lighting and cartoon shading for special rendering effects.

In Cocos Creator 3.8, basic rendering capabilities are enhanced again, such as:

• The blending feature of Reflection Probe allows reflection effect to be mixed between not only probes, but also probes and skyboxes. You can get a very natural transition effect in different baking areas and indoor to outdoor scenes.
• Adding practical built-in materials such as materials for eyeballs and skin which can make characters rendering more vivid. And the transparent material used for leaves can make the vegetation more realistic.
• Supports pre-baked simulation animations exported by Zenustech Zeno & 3DMark Houdini for high quality simulation of fluid, cloth, and more.

2D & UI

In addition to the many 3D features, Cocos Creator has also been enhancing and improving the 2D pipeline, improving the UI and 2D-related capabilities. 

2D Pipeline Enhancement

We have unified the underlying architecture and rendering processes on different rendering backends and operating systems. It helps in increasing stability and scalability, also make it more convenient to support advanced features such as HD text, 3D UI, and 2D rendering in space in the future.

High Definition Label

For projects, the clarity of the text rendering is a key part. In version 3.8 of Cocos Creator, HD text is supported, which can significantly improve the overall quality of your project, for free.

Spine enhancement

 In this version, we replaced the Spine web library with WebAssembly runtime built from the same native library, this unified Web & Native runtime behaviors and APIs. Spine now uses C++ runtime on native platforms, uses WebAssembly on supported platforms like Web and WeChat games, while on other platforms it's using asm.js runtime. The WebAssembly runtime significantly optimized performance for Web and Wechat.

The above picture shows the test results on Xiaomi 8. As you can see, the performance of the WeChat mini game, Spine ver. 3.8 is significantly improved compared to the 3.7 version and 2.4 version, and it can still maintain 30 frames in the case of 200 Spine animations. 

Physics System Updates

New CharacterController Component

For role-playing and action games, CharacterController can significantly reduce the cost of character development and has built-in character control capabilities which can naturally interact with the environment. 

Configurable Constraints

Added configurable constraint components that can be used to customize various complex physical component connections, such as car axles, various joints, and so on.

In addition to this, the physical system has added features such as sweep collision detection, WebAssembly implementation, and sub-loading.

Animation System Upgrade

We have introduced a new feature to the Marionette animation system: pose graphs. This new feature will provide support for procedural animation as well as dual bone IK animation. Using the pose graph, developers can conveniently define various procedural animations, and action poses through the node system to build more complex and delicate scene interactions. This will also significantly reduce the number of animations users need to create character animations.

For example, you can define the IK of a character's feet on different planes, let the character climb terrain at different heights, or look in a particular direction while walking. In addition, the pose graph can also be used as a supplement to the animation state machine, which can be nested in the state machine. 

Editor

Baking Update

 In Cocos Creator 3.8, the Lightmap Baker has been enhanced to support natural shadow transitions, high-definition illumination maps, ambient occlusion (AO), hollowing-out effects, stencil masks, and shadow saturation adjustments, making it easy for developers to create realistic lighting effects.

Asset Bundle Optimization

For larger projects, the dependency on bundles is high. After collecting a lot of user needs and feedback, Cocos Creator 3.8 optimized the management interface of bundles to make bundle configuration more intuitive for each platform.

At the same time, many Bundle features have been added to make the construction of Bundles more flexible, streamline the package, and improve the construction efficiency.

1. Supports building specific bundles separately, allowing users to update resources separately.
2. Support for adding filtering options makes it easy to weed out resources that don't need to participate in the build.
3. Support for preset configuration for precise management of export options for different platforms.
4. Build time supports filtering of bundles that participate in the build (all exported by default).
5. Only build bundles are supported at build time.

New Platform Support

Google Play Games on PC

The continuous emergence of folding screens and tablet devices indicates that large-screen adaptation is becoming more and more critical for mobile games.

At this year's Google IO conference, Google Play Games on PC and large screen experience received significant attention as Android platform updates. Cocos is also officially listed as a recommended game engine for the large screen experience by Google.

Starting from Cocos Creator 3.8, you only need to check x86 architecture and the InputSDK option while building for Android to meet the platform requirements of Google Play Games on PC.

The platform is an important opportunity for Google Play to try to expand the desktop platform, and it is also an important opportunity for many developers to gain new users.

Google AdMob For Cocos Creator

We’ve also been working behind the scenes to help the many developers on our Discord and forums that have asked for better connection to Google Ads. We had Google AdSense extension for a little while, now with v3.8 release, we also have Google AdMob extension ready for all developers. We will have a separate article to discuss this and how you can get start with it. In addition, we will release the extension as open source project so that developers who want to develop native extensions or integrate third party C++ SDKs can refer to this repository. It includes everything you need to know, from C++ plugin integration with CMake for different platforms, to exposing TypeScript APIs from C++ library, and the usage of Swig binding system etc.

We'll be releasing the extension in the coming weeks as well as tutorials in the coming future.

RenderGraph: Infrastructure for Custom Render Pipeline

 The customization capability of render pipeline based on RenderGraph is officially opened to developers in 3.8. Developers can easily customize the render pipeline through the interface of RenderGraph. This critical extensibility can help developers scale from low end devices with simpler rendering process to high performance devices with more complex pipeline for cutting edge rendering quality. We have provided the custom forward render pipeline and the custom deferred render pipeline based on RenderGraph for direct usage or customization reference. More importantly, we have also supported ComputeShader capability in RenderGraph to release the computing power of GPU.

WebAssembly

Since 3.8.0, some compute-intensive engine modules began using WebAssembly implementations to improve runtime performance on web. It currently includes Spine, WebGPU backends, Bullet, and PhysX physical system backends.

The engine also provides a WebAssembly module sub-packaging mechanism to reduce first-load content and loading times.

Message from the Engine Team

We are excited to announce the release of 3.8 LTS, a gift to the game development community. We hope that this release will serve as a milestone of the two and a half years since the 3.0 release, and we hope that developers who have not yet upgraded to the latest version of 3.x will join us.

In the past 13 years, Cocos has established a huge user base and active community ecology in the field of game development and multiple industries. We have strived to follow our motto - to simplify content creation. This pushes us to make game development simpler, provide higher performance, ensure better cross-platform compatibility and more professional rendering quality for 3D mobile applications.

Millions of developers are supporting us. Achieving excellence with the Cocos engine is our great responsibility, and we will continue to move forward and live up to their expectations.

In addition to new features, Cocos Creator 3.8.0 significantly improves user experience and system stability. We invite you to click Read More to read them.

Let's look forward to Cocos's future development. We believe that we will create more possibilities with your support and our efforts.