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

Designing the Input System

The topic of the User Interface (UI) often focuses quite heavily on visual elements, layout, and design. For the majority of web applications, the basics of tracking a pointer, touches, or taps along with keyboard input are handled by the web browser, which in turn delegates many responsibilities, such as hardware driver interfacing to the underlying Operating System (OS). When using a web-native application library such as Babylon.js, developers can take advantage of these already-present abstractions to make it quick and easy to add user interaction elements to their scenes. In this section, we’ll learn how to add the application scaffolding that can support multiple types of inputs on-the-fly, followed by implementing a way to map arbitrary inputs to actions or commands in the game.

It’s said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so let’s flatter the Babylon.js team by “stealing” (called “researching...