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

Converting the Space-Truckers application into a PWA

As we discussed shortly prior to this section, a hallmark – or signature – feature of a PWA is its ability to gracefully adapt to varying conditions and host environments. How should the application behave when a network connection is lost? What happens when a new version of the app is published? When assets change, how do you ensure that any cached versions of the old asset are evicted, and the new ones are stored?

Putting the “P” in PWA

These are all good questions and present real technical and engineering challenges that need to be solved. If you are one of those beautiful, curious, intelligent, and slightly mad kinds of people, you should prepare yourself to be disappointed. While, again, these are worthy topics to study and understand, this is a case where tools have evolved to the point where it is possible to accomplish a lot while knowing very little about the underlying technology. It...