PanelWave Player Published as Open Source on npm

Munich, 7 October 2026. PanelWave today published the PanelWave Player on the public npm registry as @panelwave/player. The player is an MIT-licensed Angular library (Angular 20 to 22) that renders interactive graphic novels from a PanelWave manifest, the open JSON format the company published yesterday. Any website can embed it, and any work authored in the PanelWave format plays in it without a PanelWave account.

The release marks the completion of the player's core feature phases. The library's unit suite and an end-to-end suite with automated accessibility checks run across desktop and mobile browsers, and the player documentation describes the library as it behaves, including a published list of known limitations.

What the player renders

• Graph-based navigation. Chapters are graphs of panels; edges carry conditions evaluated against typed story variables, so branching narratives, detours and loops are ordinary graph shapes and back-navigation works throughout.
• Three view modes. Panel view for one panel at a time, page view for composed comic pages, and canvas view, in which a chapter's panels sit on one continuous plane and a camera glides between them along the story.
• Video panels and a four-bus audio engine. Video layers with loop and ping-pong modes and poster frames; ambient, music, voiceover and sound-effect buses with independent volume.
• A comic balloon engine. Ten balloon types drawn as SVG, with a styling cascade shared with the PanelWave CMS so authored lettering renders identically for readers.
• Interactive hotspots and panel variants. Clickable regions that navigate, set variables or open bonus content, and alternative panel content selected by reader state.
• Localization without a reload. Per-locale text and asset variants with fallback chains and instant language switching.
• Accessibility. Keyboard traversal of the whole story including hotspots, labelled controls, reduced-motion support that also degrades video autostart and camera movement, and reader settings for manga mode and high contrast.
• Paywalls without payment processing. An entitlement adapter interface delegates access decisions to the host's own backend; the player never handles payments itself.
• Consent-aware analytics and a plugin sandbox. Nothing is recorded without consent where the work requires it; third-party plugins run in sandboxed iframes under a capability model.

Open source by design

The player is the second open layer of the PanelWave ecosystem, alongside the format itself. It deliberately contains all rendering logic: the commercial PanelWave CMS embeds the same library for its preview rather than reimplementing rendering, which guarantees that a creator's preview matches what readers see and keeps a single rendering codebase in the open.

"A format is only open if there is an open way to read it," said Jens Hoppe, founder of PanelWave. "Publishing the player under MIT means a creator can leave our tools at any time, host their work themselves, and it still plays. That is the promise the whole ecosystem rests on."

Availability

The PanelWave Player is available now from npm for Angular 20, 21 and 22 applications. Installation, a five-minute embed, the complete input and output reference and contributor documentation are at docs.panelwave.org/player. The source repository, issue tracker and demo application are linked from panelwave.org/player.