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

Space-Truckers: The Main Menu

One of the primary features that pretty much every single video game in existence has in common with each other is that they all have a Main Menu. Space-Truckers is to be no exception, but we first have to sit down and figure out how we want our menu to look before we can make it. We start with a basic concept sketch of the layout and elements of the menu, which we’ll then use as a guidepost for building out a PG snippet of the menu. From the background to the foreground, we’ll build up a GUI menu display progressively, adding containers, a title block, and then buttons that will be ready to practically drag and drop into the codebase!

Basic Design

Firstly, let’s think about the application’s navigational structure. Consulting our State Diagram (Fig. 4.1), we can see that there are a couple of different branches that the state can transition to from the Menu AppState. With the exception of the initial transition into the...