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Excalibur v0.23.0 Release

· 2 min read
Erik Onarheim
Erik Onarheim
Maintainer of Excalibur

This is a big release for Excalibur on our journey to 1.0.0. If you’d like to follow along, we now have a tentative roadmap available! The goal for this release was to simplify our collision infrastructure and utilities.

Thanks to our community contributors for all of their help! (see the full release notes)

Notable highlights​

  • Collision groups have been re-implemented to be more in line with industry practice. They allow you to determine which colliders collide with others.
  • Collision behavior and properties are now contained within the new type ex.Collider
    • Collision types are now sourced from ex.Collider
    • Collision groups now live on ex.Collider
    • Collision shapes dictate collision geometry live on ex.Collider
    • Collision pixel offset allows shifting of colliders by a pixel amount
    • Properties like mass, torque, friction, inertia, bounciness are now all part of ex.Collider instead of ex.Body
  • Decoupling Actor from the collision system
    • ex.CollisionPair now works on a pair of Colliders instead of a pair of Actors to represent a potential collision
    • ex.CollisionContact now works on a pair of Colliders instead of a pair of Actors to represent an actual collision
  • New helpful methods for colliders
    • Find the closest line between 2 colliders or shapes
    • ex.Actor.within now works based on the surface of the geometry, not the center of the object

animated gif demonstrating finding the closest lines between several shapes

  • Actions moveBy, rotateBy, and scaleBy have been changed to move an actor relative to the current position
    • This change makes implementing patrolling behavior moving 400 pixels left and right forever as easy as: actor.actions.moveBy(-400, 0, 50).moveBy(400, 0, 50).repeatForever();

repeated patrolling behavior demo for the above Actions code example, showing the Actor moving back and forth along a platform

  • Many name refactorings and deprecations to improve usability (see the full release notes)

New sample game​

We have a new sample game to illustrate best practices when developing with Excalibur.

sample platformer animation, showing the player, a patrolling NPC, and patrolling enemies

Look forward to many more updates in the months ahead!