Download Cocos Creator 3.7.3 from the Cocos Dashboard.
We’re getting pretty close to the summer and Cocos Creator 3.8. However, before we do that, we still have a bit more spring cleaning for the engine and some fantastic new additions. We have improved the render pipeline and added a new extension for Visual Studio Code to help you with shaders. We also added support for Taobao mini games for those in China and some added XR support for the next generation of VR and AR games.
If you want the complete developers notes for 3.7.3, check our forums by clicking here.
Improving the Render pipeline
We are getting better and better results for the render pipeline and are pushing to improve it by adding more support, such as GLES backend support, RT raster, and offscreen window support. This is making for amazing new items. One is new advanced materials for skin, hair, and eyes, with optimized built-in lighting models. You can see the quality from our demos of the work.
Cocos Effects (Visual Studio Code Plug-in)
For some users working with shaders, we have had a lot of comments by developers on having issues understanding and editing the .effect files because they can’t find internal functions, some macros are invisible, or they have to search chunk files to get the corresponding content. This bugged us too, so we decided to help developers with the Cocos Effect plug-in for Visual Studio Code.
The plug-in allows you to improve your speed to build shaders inside VSC. The first version only allows for improving your coloring for YAML. But we decided to go bigger due to the excitement of just this version.
This updated version released today includes quickly finding functions, detailed information on function arguments, function locations, macros, and line numbers. This new version also provides syntax checks, auto-completion, and syntax coloring. Thanks to our engineers for making this possible.
You can get the add-on by searching ‘Cocos Effect’ in the Visual Studio Code extension area.
Other great new features
· Custom Render Pipeline based on Render Graph supports for GLES backend.
· Deprecated interfaces, such as addRasterView, addComputeView, etc., and added new interfaces, such as addRenderTarget、addDepthStencil, etc., which are used for improving JS memory recycling.
· Custom Render Pipeline added support for Offscreen Window & RT Raster.
· The renderer component now provides a clearer Material acquisition method and can clearly distinguish shared materials and material instances, and the getMaterial method is deprecated.
· [XR] Added HEADTRACKING & PASSTHROUGH to XR build template.
· [XR] Support for EYE RENDER END callback.
· Support for manually inputting iOS developer accounts in the editor.
