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A comparison table of the features supported by each version of Phaser Editor 2D
A comparison table of the features supported by each version of Phaser Editor 2D
I started Phaser Editor 2D development in late 2015. At the time, I had some experience making Eclipse plugins, and I selected this platform to create the HTML5 game development IDE. In the beginning, the Eclipse platform provided many tools for free and helped me to start the project quickly. Modern, hackable editors like VS Code or Atom were not available or popular in that date. However, the time proved it was a bad choice to keep attached to the Eclipse platform: (1) I had to simulate a Phaser scene using desktop technologies, like JavaFX or Eclipse SWT. (2) In v2 of the editor, I tried to use an embedded WebView in the Scene Editor but it is an unstable Eclipse component. (3) The editor is open source, but the Phaser community is around JavaScript, not Java, and it had few contributions. (4) It is huge, it has to package the Java runtime and the Eclipse runtime. In 2019, I determined to start again and build the IDE in pure web technologies. I am happy with the results. However, there is a lot to do. Eventually, the new IDE will get all the features present in the previous versions, and more. I hope this comparison table may help you to decide what version of the editor is better for your project.
| Feature |
Phaser Editor 2D v1 
|
Phaser Editor 2D v2 
|
Phaser Editor 2D v3 
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Phaser version | Phaser v2 (Phaser CE compatible) | Phaser v3 (updated) | Phaser v3 (updated) |
| Phaser v4 | Never | Never | To-Do |
| Constantly updated | No | No | Yes |
| IDE documentation | Full documentation. Tutorials. | Partial documentation. Tutorials. | Full documentation |
| Platform | Eclipse IDE based (Windows, Linux, macOS) | Eclipse IDE based (Windows, Linux, macOS) | Client (Web Browser/ElectronJS). Server (Windows, Linux, macOS) |
| Scene Editor | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scene Editor - Reusable Objects | Prefabs system (limited) | Object Factory (limited) | Prefabs and Components system (powerful) |
| Scene Editor - Physics | Phaser Arcade | No | To-Do |
| Scene Editor - Tilemaps | Yes | No | Yes |
| Scene Editor - Shapes | No | No | Yes |
| Scene Editor - Pixel Perfect | Based on JavaFX, may mismatch with final Phaser game. | Good match (based on Phaser, running on an out-dated and unstable embedded WebView). | Perfect match (based on Phaser, running in a modern browser) |
| Asset Pack Editor | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Animations Editor | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Texture Atlas Editor | Yes | Yes | To-Do |
| Audio Sprite Editor | Yes | No | No |
| Code Editor | Yes (out-dated) | Yes (full featured) | Yes (a third-party editor is recommended) |
| Project Templates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Project Templates - Official Phaser Examples | Yes | Yes | No |
| TypeScript support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Phaser API browser tools | Yes (powerful) | Yes (even more powerful) | No (a new, different product will be created for that) |
| Dark Mode | No | Yes (has glitches) | Yes |
| Automatic Updates | No | Yes | Yes |
| Download Size | > 500MB (huge) | > 500MB (huge) | < 15MB (small) |