LittleJS

New Demos

• 3D Third Person - Run a ball around a field of blocks with a camera that swings around behind it and pulls in at walls
• Camera Shake - A bump on Space and a blast on a click, shakes that add up and fade on their own
• Box2D Platformer - Jump up through one way ledges, drop back down through them and ride conveyor belts with crates, all in Box2D
• 3D Plugin - The island's ball now rolls the way the camera looks, with the camera swinging around behind it
• Platforming Game - The camera now looks ahead the way you run, stays over the level, and explosions shake the screen

New Changes

• Cameras: the new camera plugin follows things for you. new FollowCamera(player) follows in 2D with smooth movement, a dead zone, level bounds, zoom, and a look ahead that shows more of the way the player is going and slides across when they turn. new ThirdPersonCamera3D(player) puts the 3D camera on a pole behind the player that swings around as they move, turns with the mouse or a gamepad stick, and pulls in when a wall gets in the way. Smoothing is in seconds, so it feels the same at any frame rate
• cameraShake(amount): screen shake for hits and explosions, in 2D and 3D, with or without a camera; shakes add up and fade by themselves, and hold through a pause or a hit stop at time scale 0
• A child object's pos and angle can be set: it stays where you put it and moves with its parent from there, where before the parent put it straight back
• setWorldPos3D, setWorldRotation3D and getWorldRotation3D put a 3D child at a place or rotation in the world
• Box2D: beginContact tells where two objects touched and how hard they hit; oneWay platforms, conveyor belts with setSurfaceSpeed, and preSolve for letting a contact pass, as for dropping through a ledge
• engineAddPlugin takes an updatePost function, called after every object has moved each update

Breaking Changes

• CameraControl3D and FirstPersonCamera3D now set the 3D camera after every object has moved, not in their own update(); code that calls their update() by hand and reads the camera calls updateCamera() after it

Check out the latest on GitHub to see everything we've been working on!

1.27.1 - 2026-10-14

New Changes

• debugLineWidth and setDebugLineWidth(width): the width in pixels of the outlines debug shapes are drawn with, the physics boxes and the tile collision view among them, 2 as before, larger to make them easier to see
• render3D.fogDepth measures fog by depth along the view instead of distance from the camera, and render3D.fogFadeStart / fogFadeEnd fade see through draws to transparent with distance, so a scene can melt into its sky instead of a fog color
• getVelocityAtPoint(pos) on an object: the velocity of a point on it, its velocity and its spin together, so the tip of a spinning blade moves faster than its middle; a Box2dObject asks Box2D, about its center of mass
• collideWithTile gets a third argument, isHit: true when the object overlaps the tile where its move put it, or a bullet's ray goes into it, and false for the places the physics only tries to find which side it hit, so a game can act on a hit once and ignore the rest
• The Object Collect short: balls drifting through a square and a circle, colored by engineObjectsCallback while inside and counted by engineObjectsCollect, and a click pushes away the balls near the mouse
• A debug build warns once when a game sets a child object's pos or angle, which its parent puts back every frame, naming localPos or localAngle to set instead
• The example browser's Share button copies a link to the code as it is in the editor, crushed into the link with JSONCrush so nothing is stored anywhere; the link opens the example it was made from and runs the shared code
• PostProcessPlugin and setShaderCode take a built in effect on its own, new PostProcessPlugin(postProcessVignette()), joining it with postProcessEffects as they would have needed; before, that failed to compile with an error about uv
• emitter.finishCallback on ParticleEmitter and ParticleEmitter3D: called once with the emitter when it finishes, done emitting and its last particle gone, so a game can play a sound or start the next effect when an explosion is over; not when it is destroyed immediately, as a scene clear does
• Box2D beginContact gets a fourth argument, impactSpeed: how fast the two bodies were closing along the contact normal as they touched, spin included, so a game can tell a hard hit from a graze; the Box2D Pool short's click goes by it

Fixes

• PostProcessPlugin copies the frame into its texture on the GPU with copyTexImage2D instead of uploading the canvas, which Firefox read back to the CPU every frame; a game with a post process there ran several times slower, AstroBlast's glow at 7 fps where it now runs at 31
• particleEffect's assert for an option it does not have lists the options it does, and names the one meant when only its case is off, emitrate for emitRate
• The build scripts, the engine's and the starter, module and TypeScript examples', run their tools with node and no shell, so a file name can not run as a command; a data file with a space in its name no longer breaks the examples' zip, and a tool that is not installed fails with a message to run npm install instead of being downloaded by npx

New Demos

• Platform Physics - Platforms you jump up through and drop down from, a one way door, a lift, a crate to push, a bouncy ball and an ice floor
• Light System - Now with a swinging searchlight cone
• Light Shadows - The mouse light now shines through a window of colored panes

New Changes

• 2D light cones and gels: light.coneAngle makes a light a cone, like a flashlight or a car's headlights, turning with the light, and light.gel is a picture the light shines through, so one light can be a car's headlights and tail lights; shadows still fall through both
• One way collision: layer.setOneWay(tile, direction) makes a tile a platform you jump up through and land on, or one way in any direction, and it turns and mirrors with the tile's art; objects, particles and raycasts all follow it, and a solid object's oneWay does the same for moving platforms
• Swept bullets: obj.isBullet moves a small fast object along a ray, so it never passes through a wall at any speed, and collideWithTile sees it right where it hits; the platformer's bullets use it
• Cloud saves on Newgrounds and Wavedash, the same on both: cloudSave(slot, data) and cloudLoad(slot), which tells an empty slot (null) from a load that failed (undefined) so a game never saves over a save it could not load; Wavedash stats and presence, and Newgrounds events. The Wavedash calls are tested on Wavedash; the Newgrounds ones are built from its API docs and not yet tried on the site

Fixes

• A light pass or tile layer redraw whose callback throws hands back the screen, where a game that caught the error went on drawing into the lightmap or the layer
• A shader disposed before its first draw is let go of, and a 3D particle callback that changes a particle's age or life time keeps the change
• An object of no size is no longer held to the speed cap by solid collision it never has
• 3D level editor: a scale drag keeps a mirrored axis mirrored, a turned object lands and pastes by its turned box, and opening the editor lets go of a mouse the game captured

Check out the latest on GitHub to see everything we've been working on!

New Demos

• 3D Reflections - A chrome ball reflecting the scene around it, captured live, and balls from polished to rough under a sky painted in code
• Light Shadows - Now with a sun throwing long shadows across the room

New Changes

• 3D environment maps: render3D.environment is a cube map that reflective surfaces reflect, sharp or blurred by their shininess, and render3D.skyBox draws one as the sky; makeCubeMap paints one in code, loadCubeMap loads six images, and a cube map with no faces captures the scene around a point, like three.js's CubeCamera. An object's roughness sets its shininess the way glTF measures it, and glTF models read theirs
• DirectionalLight, a sun for the 2D light system: long shadows across open space, a background marked castBackgroundShadow lit only at its edges facing the sun, its sunDirection toward the sun as in 3D; one per scene, nothing changes without one
• Wavedash plugin: achievements and leaderboards on Wavedash, the same shape as the Newgrounds plugin, doing nothing off Wavedash
• Object collision with many solids is far faster, through a grid: 2000 movers went from about 1.3 s a frame to 12 ms, every contact resolved exactly as before
• A failed assert's error says what went wrong, and common mistakes say what to pass: a color where a tile goes, a number where a vec2 goes, arguments out of order, changing a color constant
• Shader.dispose() frees a shader's programs; skinned glTF models bend about a fifth faster; the level editors autosave a big map once the edits stop for a moment
• The package exports littlejsengine/plugins/* and littlejsengine/src/*

Breaking Changes

• The built in video capture is removed (key 8, debugVideoCaptureStart and the rest); the FAQ shows how to save a game frame by frame with engineStep
• Node 22.12 or later to install the package; a game in the browser needs no Node
• The Electron example is removed
• render3d.js is in three files, render3d.js, render3dMesh.js and render3dObject.js; nothing changes for a game on a build in dist

Fixes

• 3D solids meet as in 2D: a fast object no longer goes through a thin wall, two movers no longer pass through each other, and a pusher stops against a crate held by a wall; the speed cap applies after gravity in 2D and 3D, and setEnablePhysicsSolver(false) stops 3D collision too
• Tile collision stops an object at a wall or ceiling where it hits, not up to a frame's move short of it
• Text counts characters as a reader does: an emoji is one, an accent draws on its letter, and Windows line endings break lines
• A release build goes on past an error in its first frame, and its sounds, Box2D joints and UI shrug off NaN, Infinity and quick taps where they threw, stopped Box2D for good, or lost a click
• Particle effects: the same count whichever frame they start on, a moving emitter's particles spread along its path, and an option of the wrong kind keeps the effect's own value
• A glTF model's parts, an attached prefab's and a voxel map's see-through blocks take the settings set on the model
• Medals: an unlock in one tab is kept by another tab, and one unlocked before medalsInit stays unlocked
• A sound whose file fails to load calls its callback, a lens flare hidden at the start stays hidden, a tween that throws is ended, and many smaller fixes across the engine, the editors and the examples

Check out the latest on GitHub to see everything we've been working on!