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

Extended Topics

  • Use an SW to do something other than fetch and cache data. Take your framerates to the ultimate by moving the Space-Trucker rendering into an offscreen canvas. Essentially, you’ll use SW to do the actual rendering work on a different execution thread from the single main thread JavaScript is normally stuck with. The Babylon.js docs go into more detail on this at https://doc.babylonjs.com/divingDeeper/scene/offscreenCanvas.
  • Add a button or key combination that clears all existing scores from the database. This is a two-part feature: the first task would be to add the ability to remove or clear the scores in SpaceTruckerDb and the second to provide a way for that to be invoked.
  • Animate the entrance of each individual score in the list. Bonus points for effects that change with the rank of the score. Even more bonus points for giving players a nice fireworks display when they get a top score.
  • Split the entry JavaScript module so that the landing...