What’s New in Oasis Engine 0.5? Major Animation, Rendering, and Physics Upgrades

Oasis Engine 0.5 Highlights

Oasis Engine is a mobile‑first high‑performance Web graphics engine widely used in interactive services such as Alipay's Five Blessings and Year‑Beast events. This milestone focuses on a complete redesign of the animation system, rendering pipeline, 2D tools, physics, and ecosystem components.

Animation System

The new animation system adds an Animator component, supports BlendShape animations, and improves overall performance by about 30% . Key upgrades include:

Animation Transition : No longer requires strict bone matching between source and target animations, reducing designers' workload.

Animation Layering : Supports multi‑layer blending based on layer blend mode and weight, allowing more than two actions to be combined.

State Machine : Manage project animations via a state machine; transitions automatically apply predefined blends (conditional switching will arrive in the next milestone).

Animation Cropping : Reuse existing animation clips by trimming them without re‑authoring.

Animation Events : Script‑driven event system for greater flexibility.

Performance tests on a Mi 11 Pro with Chrome 92 show the new system’s speed advantage.

BlendShape Support

BlendShape (MorphTarget) animation, essential for detailed facial expressions, is now available on ModelMesh. The engine can import BlendShape data from glTF models and play them via the Animator component’s play() method.

Rendering Improvements

The PBR material interface has been restructured. Environment lighting now uses a three‑order spherical harmonic (9 directions × 3 RGB values) instead of cube‑map textures, freeing a shader texture unit and delivering better visual results.

A new background texture mode allows a single image to serve as the scene background.

2D Enhancements

Introduced SpriteAtlas for efficient sprite batching, reducing draw calls, memory usage, and resource requests. An integrated Atlas tool lets developers pack sprites into .atlas files directly from the editor.

Physics System

Physics APIs have been unified and script‑driven. The raycast() function is now part of a new PhysicsManager. Future work will prioritize PhysX as the core physics backend, with a compiled PhysX.js repository provided for community use.

Ecosystem Updates

Spine component now supports full‑skin swapping, single‑attachment changes, and skin mixing via addSeparateSlot and hackSeparateSlotTexture APIs. The Lottie runtime has been refactored and a command‑line tool tool-atlas-lottie converts Lottie JSON to Oasis‑compatible assets.

Other Feature Updates

Engine: Blinn‑Phong material now supports vertex colors.

Engine: Added common methods to Color class.

Editor: One‑click texture to Sprite conversion and binding.

Editor: Integrated Atlas packing tool.

Editor: Project upgrade to newer engine versions.

Editor: UI style refresh and interaction improvements.

Documentation and Samples

Documentation has been reorganized with new sections for the first game, SpriteAtlas, and 29 new editor guides, plus 33 optimized articles. The website now supports bilingual (Chinese/English) content.

24 new examples were added, covering 2D sprite optimizations, Spine skin/attachment changes, Lottie performance baselines, and various animation, physics, lighting, texture, camera, and scene features.

Overall unit‑test coverage increased from 45% to 49% , with added tests for the math library and material system.

Roadmap Preview – Milestone 0.6

Upcoming features include an integrated IBL baking tool for offline environment map generation, deeper PhysX integration with new Collider, CapsuleCollider, RigidBody, and optimized raycast methods.

For more details, see the milestone page and change log on the Oasis Engine GitHub repository.