What’s New in Galacean Engine 1.2? Explore the Latest 2D/3D Features, Editor, and ShaderLab

Galacean has released a major milestone that adds numerous engine features and a companion web editor, improving the development experience for 2D and 3D interactive projects. The editor is available for internal testing at galacean.antgroup.com.

Key Updates

Scene: New asset files, multi‑scene rendering, and environment‑light baking.

Texture: Support for KTX2 GPU texture compression and a dynamic mode that boosts video playback performance.

Effects: GPU particle renderer added to close the effects gap.

Shader: Introduction of the ShaderLab language for easier custom shader authoring.

Editor: Panel management feature for a cleaner, more flexible UI layout.

Scene Enhancements

New Scene Assets

Users can create, delete, and export scene assets just like other assets, enabling multiple scenes to share assets within a single project and improving editing efficiency.

Environment Light Baking

The baking workflow has been redesigned: the editor now bakes lighting based on the scene and includes built‑in atmospheric scattering as background and ambient light. Users can select skybox, atmospheric scattering, solid color, or HDR texture as the source, and adjust rotation, exposure, and resolution.

Multi‑Scene Rendering

The SceneManager now supports simultaneous rendering of multiple scenes via addScene and removeScene. The scenes property holds the current render queue, and physics can be controlled per scene through the physics property.

Texture Improvements

KTX2 Compression

KTX2 compression (glTF KHR_texture_basisu) reduces texture memory usage by about 80%. Enabling the KTX2 option in the editor’s build settings activates it.

Dynamic Mode for Video

Dynamic mode improves performance for frequently changing textures, such as video playback, offering up to a 5× FPS increase on some devices.

Particle System

The GPU particle renderer has been rewritten, adding more initialization parameters and lifecycle controls, making it more artist‑friendly.

The editor does not yet support particle editing; this will arrive in a future minor version after 1.1.

ShaderLab Language

ShaderLab allows developers to define vertex and fragment shaders, rendering pipelines, and render states within a single file, simplifying custom shader creation.

A VSCode extension for ShaderLab with syntax highlighting and linting is under development.

ShaderLab syntax example:

Shader "ShaderName" {
  // uniform declarations
  mat4 renderer_ModelMat;
  ...
  SubShader "SubShaderName" {
    Pass "PassName" {
      BlendState blendState {
        SourceColorBlendFactor = BlendFactor.SourceAlpha;
        ...
      }
      BlendState = blendState;
      RenderQueueType = RenderQueueType.Transparent;
      VertexShader = vert;
      FragmentShader = frag;
      v2f vert(a2v input) { ... }
      void frag(v2f input) { ... }
    }
  }
}

Editor Panel Management

The new panel manager lets users drag, resize, and rearrange editor panels (node tree, asset, inspector) to suit their workflow.

Script Parameter Configuration

Script parameters can now be exposed in the editor UI, allowing non‑programmers to tweak properties at runtime without modifying code.

import { Script } from '@galacean/engine';
import { inspectProperty } from "@galacean/editor-decorators";
export default class extends Coin {
  @inspectProperty('Number', { value: 1, min: 0, max: 10, dragStep: 1 })
  private rotate = 1;
  onUpdate(deltaTime: number) {
    this.entity.transform.rotate(0, this.rotate, 0);
  }
}

Camera Depth Texture

The camera now provides a depth texture accessible via the camera_DepthTexture shader variable, enabling soft particles, water edge transitions, and simple post‑processing effects.

glTF Parallel Parsing

The glTF loading pipeline has been refactored to parse resources in parallel, dramatically reducing load times. Extension registration now uses a decorator: registerGLTFParse(GLTFParserType.*** ).

Sprite Frame Animation

Animation curves now support reference types, allowing assets such as sprites or materials to be key‑framed for frame‑by‑frame animation.

Mesh Low‑Level Creation

ModelMesh now supports low‑level data creation via setVertexElements and setVertexBufferBinding, offering greater flexibility and performance.

SkinnedMeshRenderer Bones

The SkinnedMeshRenderer exposes its Bones property for custom bone manipulation, and the previous rootBone initialization issue has been fixed.

Other Small Updates

Asset panel supports batch drag‑and‑drop.

View module allows clicking icons to select entities and adds 2D element selection boxes.

glTF mesh generation now includes tangents.

Option to remove built‑in punctual lights from glTF models.

Camera shader variables camera_Forward and camera_Up added.

Component deep‑clone decorator deepClone supports recursive cloning.

Math library now includes a Rand pseudo‑random generator. GraphicsResource gains an isContentLost flag. ResourceManager adds findResourcesByType method.

Example Updates

Case

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Case

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Multi‑Scene

Video Benchmark

Particle – Fire

Particle – Dream

ShaderLab

Camera Depth Texture

CPU Selection

GPU Selection

Sprite Animation

Preview

The upcoming 1.2 milestone will open the editor to public beta and launch the XR system.

Contact

Galacean open‑source community groups are available on DingTalk (ID: 31065609) and WeChat (contact: zengxinxin2010, note "galacean 加群").

Official links: galacean.antgroup.com , Engine source: github.com/galacean/engine , Toolkit source: github.com/galacean/engine-toolkit .