Comment by frading
Polygonjs Maker here.Thanks a lot for your questions.
Yes, the SDK being limited to jai beta is absolutely not something I'm happy about. I was hoping it would be public by the time polygon v2 was ready, but of course that was a gamble. Now the rumor is that it will be in 2027, so this is hopefully just a matter of waiting a bit more time. So I completely appreciate presenting Polygon like this isn't ideal.
But depending on what projects you have in mind, the node-based editor is already quite flexible. Feel free to let me know what you're thinking of building and I can tell you what you could try.
To your questions:
- Is the dev environment still web first or is that a secondary target?: I personally mostly dev in native, do most of the work and tests there, and then do final checks in wasm/js. Most of the projects I deliver using it still are web-based, so this target remains as solid as I can make it.
- [...]see changes reflected in your running app without a refresh or losing state within a second: I used to rely on that, but as projects scale grew, I always found that state would become stale in ways I did not understand, so I stopped chasing that. And when working in native against the SDK, re-compiling a project takes about 1-2seconds, so I have not needed to make this work as smoothly as in js. But I could look into it. And when you scaffold a SDK project, the wasm is reloaded without a page reload, but I think your app state my still need vuejs or react to handle that. In short: not fully sure, but it's most likely possible.
- How complete is the PBR support?: You can use env maps. The materials of imported GLTF are decent (see example: https://polygonjs.com/gui/gltf_import). Several things are still missing like clearcoat, and maybe others I am not fully aware of. There are advanced features like order-independent-transparency, volume rendering, raymarching.
- Lightprobes or lightprobe grid supported?: no light probes at the moment. I want to look into it. And I'm evaluating/experimenting with various GI solutions, which may vary depending if you're rendering polygons, SDF or voxels.
- I didn’t see support for skeleton meshes: There is none yet, but that's definitely on my roadmap.
- Also, how feasible is WebXR support?: not implemented yet, but also high on my roadmap.