melonJS 3.0.0 is finally there

Dear melonJS lovers,

After a (too) long time and a couple of release candidates, it's finally time to release a new version of melonJS ! To comply with the philosophy of the semantic versioning we are now following since the last major release, this version has been labelled 3.0.0 as it brings new features without guarantee of any backward compatibility in terms of API.

In this release, we were able to bring long-standing features, but also new ones and numerous fixes to the engine, bringing it a step closer from what developers are expecting from a modern game engine.

The CHANGELOG for this release being pretty long, here is a list of  highlight :

• compatibility with some 3rd party libraries and SDK (e,g, facebook) has been fixed
• ES6 compliance has been improved (by relying on more on ES6 functions when possible)
• vector class improvements; few issues have been fixed and we also added a 3d vector class
• level loading is now asynchronous and allow for more parameters to be passed to the related callback
• the gamepad API is finally supported, meaning that you can now use your favorite game controller
• mouse/pointer event have been optimized and now also use spatial localization/detection
• default anchoring value is now the center (as opposed to the top-left coordinates previously inherited from Tiled); that makes it more coherent/natural with what is used by default in the "industry"
• entity and renderables are now positioned respectively to their anchor value
• renderables are now using a 3d vector for positioning (bringing melonJS a step closer to a "3D" world)
• you can now define animation delay on a per-frame basis, and specify per-frame pivot points
• added support for the Physics Body Editor (on top of the already supported PhysicsEditor tool), allowing to define complex collision shapes
• we added support for the latest version of Tiled, that includes TMX orthogonal maps, or layer data encoding in JSON format
• more video scaling mode have been added (flex and fill-min)
• the repeat texture feature (e.g. for scrolling background) has been rewritten to better match the webGL philosophy

Download here: https://github.com/melonjs/melonJS/releases/tag/3.0.0

Also do note that starting from this release, our builds are no more versioned, this allows to provide a more seamless release process.

As usual, the Upgrade Guide lists additional changes, which you will find helpful if you are porting an existing game, and the corresponding updated documentation is available here.

As always, please post any bugs to our issue tracker, visit the forums if you have any support requests, or just come to say hello as we always love to hear about what you are guys doing with melonJS.

Finally, we are trying to add more and more examples that are showcasing specific features of melonJS, with a few of them already available here, but don't hesitate as well to submit any examples you would deem useful to the community.

- the melonJS team