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 Game Elements of the Route Simulation

The Helios star system is the setting for Space-Truckers, but up until now, we haven’t gotten into what that entails. A topic covered in exhaustive detail in other books both fiction and non- is the well-known fact that Space Is Big. Like, Really Big. At the scale of a solar system, distances involved are so large compared to relative sizes of things that trying to represent this huge scale accurately in our game will neither be fun nor performant.

An Overview of the Helios System

The following diagram is a rather stylized view of the Helios system – the home setting for Space-Truckers – from a bird’s-eye view. Bracketed planetary bodies show the two different start and end route possibilities –outward going in toward the sun and vice versa. In the following diagram, the different shaded regions correspond to different potential encounters for players during the driving phase:

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