Bundling of excaliburjs library

[ivasilov]

Hello,

I ran into an issue (which I fixed) but it will happen to other people so I want to offer a better way of fixing it.

I initially downloaded https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-shootemup and started making progress on my game. I wanted to upgrade to version 0.25.0 and when I tried, I received a webpack error Uncaught TypeError: __webpack_require__.r is not a function in the console.

I know my way around webpack so I quickly found out that you've migrated to webpack 5 for the 0.25.0 version. I fixed it by migrating my game to use https://github.com/excaliburjs/template-ts-webpack. This would've been a showstopper for a less experienced person, though.

The main question i have is why do you bundle the library with webpack for NPM distribution? Ideally, you should build it with tsc and leave it to the user to bundle the library.

One reason might be because you want a simple excalibur.min.js which game devs can just add to their HTML and use it straight away but that's a special case and should be handled separately (and deployed to CDN).

[eonarheim]

@kamranayub Is this because of the experimental esm module support in v0.25.x you think?

[kamranayub]

Likely. There are both builds in the package so depending on how it is referenced and pulled in will determine if the consumer gets the TSC-compiled modules (flat) or the ESM bundle.

The reason ESM support was added was to fix consuming from Dino and Dino Bundle which needed the bundled file to support the other loader-based files we have.

[eonarheim]

I've created issue to investigate and make some changes if possible, thanks for bringing this up @ivasilov!

Issue #2158

You are correct, one goal is to have a script excalibur.min.js that can be included on the page.