It has been over 4 months since the Ply 1.1 release in April.
Life got busy in good ways: I went on my senior trip to Berlin, found a boyfriend, moved in with him, started my first job, finished Flowquill, and went to university orientation camp. Between all that, Ply saw some heavy engineering work.
🔗Rewriting input methods
Back in April, someone opened an issue showing that typing Chinese characters ended up reversed on Windows.
If you only type in English, input seems straightforward: hit a key, get a character code, draw a glyph. Yet for most of the world, text input relies on multi-stage composition. With Pinyin, Kana-to-Kanji, Hangul, dead keys, or mobile voice-to-text, keystrokes aren't put down immediately. Ply had no real concept of an Input Method Editor (IME).
Over the past four months, I rewrote the OS-level input pipelines. On Windows, that meant dealing with Imm32 and Text Services Framework messages. Linux required supporting both legacy X11 XIM and Wayland text-input-unstable-v3. Android and iOS needed native virtual keyboard hooks and predictive text streams. On web, I built an invisible DOM bridge to sync canvas state. For macOS, I worked with a cloud Mac until 4 AM rewriting Cocoa input delegates.
The final diff was +4,884 lines and -1,019 lines, our largest single feature update so far. Input across all six platforms now behaves properly whether you type in English, Chinese, Japanese, or use accent keys.
🔗What people are building
Seeing what developers build with Ply is easily one of the best parts of working on it.
🔗Emergency weather tracking (rustywx)
@kerryhatcher is building rustywx, a radar and storm-tracking tool for EMA first responders, volunteer firefighters, and storm chasers on field laptops.
This hit close to home recently when I had to evacuate due to a forest fire one kilometer away. Being back home safe, it means a lot to know Ply may be used for real emergencies.
🔗3D-printed PCB stencils (vcode)
@pszsh (Jess) created vcode, a tool for 3D printing solder paste stencils. Normal slicers leave messy retraction blobs on tiny surface-mount pads. vcode uses Connected Fermat Spirals to generate continuous-line G-code. Jess built the interface in Ply and compiled it for both native desktop and WebAssembly.
🔗Music notation (Cadenzier)
@twilit-jack is working on Cadenzier, a music notation editor. They have been testing architecture patterns in Ply, finding ways to manage signal bubbling and nested layouts with minimal boilerplate.
🔗License
The two games I built with Ply are now public on GitHub:
- Stratum: The turn-based multiplayer strategy game that originally motivated Ply.
- Fungal Economics: A real-time strategy project centered around mycelial growth and resource networks.
I used the new Ply Noncommercial License 1 so anyone can study the code, mod it, or run private servers, while keeping commercial forks off the table. If you want concrete examples of shaders, networking, or UI state in Ply, check out the repos.
🔗Next
Ply 1.2 is coming shortly, and I will do a dedicated release post once it ships.
Looking further out, planning for Ply 2.0 is underway. The goal is to switch to an independent rendering backend. Dropping upstream dependencies will let us add first-class 3D support, combining Spline-like visual tooling with Ply's immediate-mode ergonomics, 2D/3D compositing, and zero ECS overhead.
🔗Sponsorships
I plan to keep developing Ply regardless, but balancing school, work, and a cross-platform engine takes time.
I opened GitHub Sponsorships and Kofi. If Ply is useful to you or your project, backing it helps me focus more on Ply's development.
🔗Getting started
If you want to learn more about Ply, you can take a look at the interactive docs, or as before you can drop by GitHub Discussions to share what you are working on.