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

Technical Requirements

For this chapter, we’ll continue to use the development process covered in Chapter 3, Establishing the Development Workflow. If you’re just joining us on the journey or haven’t been writing code on your own, you can catch up by cloning or checking out the ch3-final tag from Space-Truckers: The GitHub Repository at https://github.com/jelster/space-truckers/tree/ch3-final. Before writing any code for the material in this chapter, it’s typically a good idea to create a new git branch that tracks the previous chapter’s branch or tag. This is unusual, as you would normally set up your branch to track develop or main. In this case, however, you want to be comparing commits from a specific point in the repository’s commit history prior to where you’re starting, and not everything that comes afterward has been covered yet.