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

Knowing What To Measure

Quantum Mechanics has a concept called the Uncertainty Principle. Named after physicist Werner Heisenberg, the principle can be summarized for our purposes as the act of measuring some quantity itself affecting the observed value of that quantity. Although merely an analogy for us currently bound to non-quantum systems, it serves as a useful warning as we take our measures and metrics: don’t let the instrumentation impact the measurements that are being taken for our app’s performance.

Starting with some general guidelines, we’ll look at some key factors that need to be attended to and accounted for to gather meaningful test data. Using those guidelines to establish a basic context, we’ll start learning some key terminology that will allow us to get into more specifics in future sections of this chapter.

General Guidelines

As we review and examine the various means and procedures for taking our performance profile, we’...