Hi everyone!

As another busy week draws to a close, I wanted to post a quick update about what I've been working on. The start of the week was all about getting the September Code Bundle finished and published, which I know a number of you are now enjoying :) (if you're a brand new Patron, please make sure you grab it! there are hundreds of examples to play with)

Since then I've spent the rest of the week working on the Phaser 3.20 release. I fixed a large number of issues over the past few days and today I spent the whole day working on the Spine Plugin. I've updated it to use the new Spine 3.8 runtimes, I've fixed a whole bunch of issues reported in GitHub and I even updated every single Labs example to use the new 3.8 plugin and assets too. You can access all of the new 3.8 examples here (make sure to select the 'Dev' version of Phaser from the drop-down, or several demos won't work)

When Phaser 3.20 is published I will remove the old examples and make the 3.8 ones the 'official' ones. Sadly, the 3.8 Runtimes are not backwards compatible with Spine 3.7. There's nothing I can do about this I'm afraid, as it's down to fundamental changes in the runtimes themselves. So, if you have any animations you've created and you want to use them with the new fixed plugin, you'll need to re-export them all using Spine 3.8. I know, it's hardly ideal, but the trade-off is worth it, as 3.8 brings quite a lot of new features with it, too.

One thing I also noticed, just before sitting down to write this post, is that the 3.8 runtimes completely break the WebGL batching support I managed to get working in with 3.7. *sigh* So, I'll spend some time on Monday getting that resolved again, too. Hopefully, that will be the last issue. At least until they release 3.9 :)

If you'd like to help test it, you can download a brand new dist build of the Spine plugin from GitHub and also a dev build of 3.20.

On Thursday, I published Phaser CE v2.13.3 to npm and GitHub. This was actually the 90th release of Phaser CE, which is quite remarkable, and again the diligent work of @samme and the CE community.

Next week I'll continue working on the 3.20 release and hopefully publish it, too. There are quite a few issues building up in GitHub, but only the Spine ones were real show-stoppers, the rest are mostly much more minor. The plan is to split my time between releasing 3.20 and carrying on development of Phaser 4.

I have decided that the next step to take with Phaser 4 is to get the canvas renderer implemented, which should be pretty quick going, and start on the Transform system. As this will underpin the whole of v4, it makes sense to do it first. Also, it's renderer agnostic, so I can get away with using a primitive canvas renderer to test virtually every feature of it.

I'll post another update as soon as I've more to share on that front.

Also worth mentioning: Hacktoberfest starts up in a few days time and is worth registering for (I did!). You may even win a t-shirt :) It'll track your contributions towards open-source projects, including Phaser, so go on... you know you want to :)

I hope you all have a good weekend and catch you all again, soon.