When comparing Goo Create vs PlayCanvas, the Slant community recommends PlayCanvas for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” PlayCanvas is ranked 16th while Goo Create is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose PlayCanvas is:
PlayCanvas has an online editor that lets you build scenes and work with other people in your team in real-time. This is all done through the web browser without having to install any additional software.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Really small project/game download sizes
Since GooCreate is native to the Web and uses WebGL directly, finished projects usually have a much smaller (sometimes orders of magnitude) download sizes compared to tools like Unity.
Pro Visual State Machine Editor
The visual state machine editor in GooCreate enables the addition of advanced interactivity without having to directly code it in JavaScript. Artists can add movement to objects, react to clicks and other events or even trigger changes in other state machines via events.
Pro Scripting via the JavaScript programming language
Pro Integrated physics engine (Cannon.js)
GooCreate is tightly integrated with the Cannon.js physics engine making it super simple to add advanced physics simulations to any project. Cannon.js is available at http://www.cannonjs.org/.
Pro Web based scene editor, no installation or plugin needed
Pro Particle systems
Pro Open game engine and physics engine
The Goo.js engine is fully open source and available at https://github.com/GooTechnologies/goojs
Pro FBX model importer supporting embedded textures and skin based animation
Pro Real-time WYSIWYG Hierarchical scene graph editor
Pro Advanced Code/Text Editor with auto completion for Engine APIs
Pro Custom publishing template CSS and JavaScript
Usually when publishing you are forced to use a template provided by the service (with a logo, social buttons, etc) or you have to download the project to customize it. In GooCreate you can pick from a few different configurable templates and then, if that is not enough, you can add custom CSS and JavaScript that gets added to the page header (i.e. JS and CSS will be run/applied before the scene even starts to load) letting you style the loading screen and any other aspects of the page without having to download anything and still being able to make use of the hosting service GooCreate provides.
Pro Good material editor
Material editor supports diffuse color, normal maps, specularity, emissiveness, opacity, reflectivity and refractivity.
Pro Timeline editor to animate entities
Pro Projects can be distributed via a web link or packaged for Android and iOS
Pro Good variety of post effects
Post effects including bloom, motion blur, anti aliasing, levels, contrast, vignette and edge detection.
Pro Real-time collaborative online editor tool
PlayCanvas has an online editor that lets you build scenes and work with other people in your team in real-time. This is all done through the web browser without having to install any additional software.
Pro Powerful assets pipeline
Assets and content delivery is very different on a web platform comparing to native. So PlayCanvas challenges best practices to allow developers decide how their content is delivered and in what form.
Async Assets download allows developers to load content as the app goes, instead of asking to download all assets in advance risking users to simply navigate away while staring at loading screens.
Formats for 3D models and textures support covers all the popular tools. And the workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping your files right into the Assets Panel. The cloud will do the rest of the hard work optimizing and converting your files into runtime-friendly and compressed data.
Pro Rendering engine runs on the browser
Has an advanced WebGL renderer that runs in the browser.
Pro Avoids having to download lots of textures for lightmaps
Lightmaps are an efficient way to deliver lighting to your scenes for a long time. But they come with the cost of large textures. PlayCanvas offers a unique solution for a web platform, it renders lightmaps when an app is loading in runtime.
This is faster than downloading MBs of textures. And it's much more convenient: simply switch your light sources to bake, and static models to be lightmapped, and the engine will do the rest.
Pro Friendly and active community
PlayCanvas has Feed as homepage for registered users, listing Dev Logs of other developers. This allows to socialize with other developers like yourself in a twitter-like environment.
More to that, there is also an active forum, where developers help each other to solve their challenges.
Developers of PlayCanvas itself are always looking forward to chat and help the community with any problems that may arise.
Pro Integrated physics engine
PlayCanvas lets users integrate physics in their game rather easily, using the powerful Bullet Physics Engine (ammo.js). Should also be noted that the physics engine is delivered as an optional library, so by default being disabled it does not add any extra download size to your apps.
Pro Has a free tier
Engine is free for projects under 200MB and with no more than 2 people on a team. The free tier has no engine restrictions.
Tools are totally free too. There are no special limiting features behind any paywalls, and free users have all the features as paid users.
There are no royalties associated with publishing your apps and games - you've made them, you own them.
It is free to publish to playcanvas.com as well, just by one click in Editor.
Pro Cross-platform support
PlayCanvas lets you build games that run in mobile, desktop browsers, and native mobile apps. PlayCanvas can even make games that can run inside mobile social media and instant messenger clients like Twitter and WhatsApp.
Pro Small app size
The engine itself weighs just under 150Kb, and it's always challenged to stay small. There is no extra weight that has to be carried with your app, just your assets and scripts in a runtime-friendly compressed form.
This allows users to engage with your content in matter of seconds, and even just under a second on a good connection.
Pro Open source
PlayCanvas is fully open source and is under active development.
Pro Very easy to use
Pro Loads extremely fast
Pro Has hot code reloading
Real-time link between your launched app and the editor allows the developer to preview and play with their scene without needing to refresh the game after every change in the code to see the updated result.
Cons
Con Going out of business
Goo create is facing bankruptcy.
Con Private projects are only available for premium users
The free tier does not support any private projects. Instead, all the code and assets will be hosted openly. While not a problem for open source games and for developers who intend to make an open source game, it can be a deal-breaker for teams who want to keep their code and assets private.