Book Image

Going the Distance with Babylon.js

By : Josh Elster
Book Image

Going the Distance with Babylon.js

By: Josh Elster

Overview of this book

Babylon.js allows anyone to effortlessly create and render 3D content in a web browser using the power of WebGL and JavaScript. 3D games and apps accessible via the web open numerous opportunities for both entertainment and profit. Developers working with Babylon.js will be able to put their knowledge to work with this guide to building a fully featured 3D game. The book provides a hands-on approach to implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running, and productive in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and links to fully working self-contained code snippets, you’ll start by learning about Babylon.js and the finished Space-Truckers game. You’ll also explore the development workflows involved in making the game. Focusing on a wide range of features in Babylon.js, you’ll iteratively add pieces of functionality and assets to the application being built. Once you’ve built out the basic game mechanics, you’ll learn how to bring the Space-Truckers environment to life with cut scenes, particle systems, animations, shadows, PBR materials, and more. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to structure your code, organize your workflow processes, and continuously deploy to a static website/PWA a game limited only by bandwidth and your imagination.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Building the Application
7
Part 2: Constructing the Game
13
Part 3: Going the Distance

Prototyping the Driving Phase

There’s a lot to do, so let’s dive right into it. Due to the way the driving phase is designed, players must navigate their trucks along a route that’s been pre-determined by the players in the previous game phase. The nature of the overall planned route determines similar overall characteristics of the driving route. Factors such as total transit time, distance, and velocities all fall into that kind of characteristic. Others, such as random encounters along the path, are more localized to a specific portion of the path. The behavior of each encounter is variable, but all will have a general form of forcing the player to make choices to avoid/obtain a collision while piloting their space-truck. Capturing the correlations between the two phases is an important design specification that will be useful – here’s what is listed on the Space-Trucker Issue created for that purpose:

Figure 8.2 – Comparison of Route Planning versus driving phase variables. Source: https://github.com/jelster/space-truckers/issues/84

Figure 8.2 –...