It's only been two weeks since the previous version, but we developed some great new UI features and didn't want to hold them back, so Phaser Editor 4.4.0 is now out! We hope they'll impact your productivity greatly.
Live Chat Support
You can now open a live chat session with our support team directly from within the editor. Just click the new chat icon and it'll open a support session window. This isn't AI chat or a 'FAQ search'. You will actually be leaving messages for, and getting responses from the team. Since we're a small team at the moment we may not be able to answer you immediately, but we will reply.
Real-time Sprite Animation Preview
Phaser allows you to create sprites that play frame-by-frame animations, commonly used in most games made in Phaser. In this new version of Phaser Editor you can now see these animations playing directly into the Scene preview, so you'll get immediate feedback on how the scene will appear in your running game.
To use sprite animations in Phaser Editor you must first create an Animations file and then add it to an Asset Pack.
Once you have your animations ready, you can create a Sprite by simply dragging an animation block from the Blocks view and dropping it into the scene. To get a real-time playback of the animation, you must activate the Animation Preview parameter, in the Animation section of the Inspector view.
Learn more about the sprite animations
Improved "Go To" Dialog
The "Go To" command has always allowed you to show all of the Scenes in your project and open one of them quickly. It's super handy. In this release we have improved it further and you can now "go to" almost anything.
To use it, access the Go To... command from the main toolbar (or press Ctrl+Alt+O or Cmd+Opt+O on macOS)
The new enhanced dialog will now let you jump to Scenes, like before, but also prefabs, user components, asset packs and sprite animations. You can select one of these elements to open it in its respective editor.
You can zoom in/out of this dialog by just pressing Shift and scrolling the mouse wheel.
Learn more about the Go To command
New Game Object Sort Commands
An important part of constructing a scene is placing your Game Objects onto the display list in the correct order. For example, you want to make sure your avatar clothing appears above their body, not behind it, right?
To do this you can use the "Move Up", "Move Down", "Move Top", and "Move Bottom" commands. These commands are available in the context menu (Edit submenu) and in this release we've also included them in the Scene Tools Panel as icon shortcuts:
Visual Studio Code integration
Phaser Editor is all about visual tools. For coding, we recommend using the popular Visual Studio Code editor. Visual Studio Code is pretty much a standard for programming web applications, thefore in this new version of Phaser Editor we have further simplified the integration.
First, we have included a new VS Code button in the main toolbar. Clicking this will immediately open the project in Visual Studio Code. This button executes the Open Visual Studio Code command, which also responds to the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+E (Cmd+Opt+E in macOS).
This is a command that has existed for a long time in Phaser Editor, but now we unified it with another command Open Output Source File in VS Code. That is, now with a single command you can open the project in VS Code, or open the active code file.
For example, if you are editing the scene Level.scene and click the icon, Phaser Editor will tell VS Code to open the file Level.js (or Level.ts if you're using TypeScript). This also applies to user components. If you're editing a component in Phaser Editor, such as AnchorComp, VS Code will open the AnchorComp.js file. This way, you can quickly access the source code for the scenes and components you're working on.
Learn more about Visual Studio Code integration
Updated for Phaser v3.85.2
We recently released Phaser v3.85.2. This version included a couple of high priority fixes and as such, we have updated all of the Phaser Editor templates to use it. It's now fully integrated with this version of Phaser Editor.
Available Now!
Phaser Editor v4.4 is available for download for Windows, macOS and Linux from the Downloads page of your User Account.
If you don't have a subscription we have a 30-day trial on offer at the moment.