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

Writing and Using Shaders in Babylon.js

Being that shaders are defined using plain text, there are a lot of different ways to store and load shaders in a project. We’ll review some of the ways to accomplish this after we learn a bit about how shader code is structured. The Create Your Own Shader (CYOS) tool is the shader equivalent of the Babylon.js Playground and is just one way to write shader code for Babylon.js. Navigating to the CYOS URL at https://cyos.babylonjs.com shows the shader code on the left pane and a live preview of the output on the right:

Figure 11.4 – The Babylon.js Create Your Own Shader tool functions similarly to the BJS Playground

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that the shader code is defined for vertex and fragment shaders in the left-hand pane, while a live preview shows on the right. Starter templates can be selected from the dropdowns, along with different meshes to use in the preview.

Just like the Playground...