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

A Detour into Sound Management

The topic of playing music and sound FX has come up previously in our journey – the theme song sound is played as part of the Splash Screen that we built in Chapter 5, Adding a Cut Scene and Handling Input, after all. The sound plays just fine, and everything seems to work, so what need is there to make things more complicated for no apparent reason? This is an excellent point to raise because, in software, the best approaches tend to also be the simplest, and simple is good because it means fewer things can go wrong (by definition). When fewer things can go wrong in software, it’s easy and cheap to make changes, additions, and enhancements and that is good for both Engineering and Accounting – a two-for-one special!

What all of that is getting to is that even though it works fine in isolation to load and directly play the BABYLON.Sound instance directly in the Screen itself, things break down when more than one Scene and Screen...