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)

Setting up CTF


In order to have a proper Capture-the-Flag game, we first need to have teams. There are several things that need to be associated with a given team:

  • Flags (and the flag color)

  • Players (and the player skins)

  • Spawn points

  • Bullets (if you want to avoid same-team damage)

  • Potentially map decorations/materials

The simplest way to associate each of these elements with a team is to just add a property with a simple value such as R or B to represent Red or Blue (or some other team name). A more advanced approach could be to create a Team class that holds references to everything that belongs to that team, since that could offer optimizations such as limiting the number of collision checks that need to be performed. If you do that, however, make sure you remove all the appropriate references from the Team container when removing something (such as a bullet) from the world in order to avoid memory leaks.

Next, we need to modify our map to add flags for the Red and Blue teams, which we'll represent...