Book Image

Game Development with Three.js

By : Isaac Sukin
Book Image

Game Development with Three.js

By: Isaac Sukin

Overview of this book

The advent of WebGL and its inclusion in many browsers enabled JavaScript programs running in a web browser to access the GPU without a plugin or extension. Three.js is a next generation high-level library that makes it possible to author complex 3D computer animations that display in the browser using nothing more than a simple text editor. The development of these new tools has opened up the world of real-time 3D computer animations to a far broader spectrum of developers. Starting with how to build 3D games on the web using the Three.js graphics library, you will learn how to build 3D worlds with meshes, lighting, user interaction, physics, and more. Along the way, you'll learn how to build great online games through fun examples. Use this book as a guide to embrace the next generation of game development! Moving on from the basics, you will learn how to use Three.js to build game worlds using its core components, including renderers, geometries, materials, lighting, cameras, and scenes. Following on from this, you will learn how to work with mouse and keyboard interactions, incorporate game physics, and import custom models and animations. You will also learn how to include effects like particles, sounds, and post-processing. You will start by building a 3D world, and then create a first person shooter game using it. You will then be shown how to imbue this FPS game with a “capture the flag” gameplay objective. With Game Development with Three.js, you will be able to build 3D games on the Web using the Three.js graphics library.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Asset management


Primitive geometric shapes are great for tests, but any serious game these days will likely make heavy use of 3D models created in a specialized program such as Blender, Maya, or 3ds Max. These models need to be imported into Three.js scenes and converted to THREE.Mesh objects with geometry and materials. Luckily, Three.js provides importers called loaders for a variety of file formats.

Loaders

For our flags, we'll use a simple mesh in Collada format. (Collada is an XML-based format for storing 3D mesh and animation data, with files ending in .dae.) You can download our flag mesh from the Packt Publishing website. The ColladaLoader is not included in the main Three.js library, but can be copied from examples/js/loaders/ColladaLoader.js and then included in your HTML as:

<script src="ColladaLoader.js"></script>

Then the model can be loaded like this:

var loader = new THREE.ColladaLoader();
loader.load('flag.dae', function(result) {
  scene.add(result.scene);
});

Often...