FAQ’s

What is the difference between @playcanvas/react and playcanvas?

PlayCanvas is a 3D engine, @playcanvas/react is a library for building 3D apps with PlayCanvas. Most of the time you will use @playcanvas/react in your project and you won’t need to worry about the PlayCanvas engine. However any PlayCanvas feature or class is available to you if you need it.

What are PlayCanvas Components?

PlayCanvas is built on the concept of Entities and Components (ECS). Entities are nodes in the scene graph and Components are the features of those nodes. They add functionality to entities. This fits well with React’s declarative approach to building UIs.

Is this a replacement for the PlayCanvas Editor?

No, this is not a replacement for the PlayCanvas Editor. It’s an alternative way to build projects using web tooling.

How does this compare to react-three-fiber?

Conceptually it’s similar to react-three-fiber . However PlayCanvas has an ECS that include a wider set of features meaning features such as physics, gaussian splats, and more are available out of the box.

Is this a react renderer?

No, not currently, although work is underway to implement a the react renderer . At the moment, it’s simply a thin wrapper around the PlayCanvas engine, surfacing the PlayCanvas API as a react component library.