Book Image

Game Development with Three.js

By : Isaac Sukin
Book Image

Game Development with Three.js

By: Isaac Sukin

Overview of this book

The advent of WebGL and its inclusion in many browsers enabled JavaScript programs running in a web browser to access the GPU without a plugin or extension. Three.js is a next generation high-level library that makes it possible to author complex 3D computer animations that display in the browser using nothing more than a simple text editor. The development of these new tools has opened up the world of real-time 3D computer animations to a far broader spectrum of developers. Starting with how to build 3D games on the web using the Three.js graphics library, you will learn how to build 3D worlds with meshes, lighting, user interaction, physics, and more. Along the way, you'll learn how to build great online games through fun examples. Use this book as a guide to embrace the next generation of game development! Moving on from the basics, you will learn how to use Three.js to build game worlds using its core components, including renderers, geometries, materials, lighting, cameras, and scenes. Following on from this, you will learn how to work with mouse and keyboard interactions, incorporate game physics, and import custom models and animations. You will also learn how to include effects like particles, sounds, and post-processing. You will start by building a 3D world, and then create a first person shooter game using it. You will then be shown how to imbue this FPS game with a “capture the flag” gameplay objective. With Game Development with Three.js, you will be able to build 3D games on the Web using the Three.js graphics library.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Timing


As we start building more realistic examples, you'll notice delta parameters being passed around to functions that affect physics. Those deltas represent an amount of time since the last time physics was calculated, and they're used to smooth out movement over time.

The naive way to move objects in code is to simply change the object's position. For example, to move an object across the canvas, you might write obj.x += 10 inside your animation loop to move it 10 units every frame. This approach suffers from the issue that it is dependent on the frame rate. In other words, if your game is running slowly (that is, fewer frames per second), your object will also appear to move slowly, whereas if your game is running quickly (that is, more frames per second), your object will appear to move quickly.

One solution is to multiply the speed by the amount of time that has passed between rendering frames. For example, if you want your object to move 600 units per second, you might write obj.x...