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)

Rendering optimizations


Three.js has built-in support for other detail-related optimizations as well in order to make processing faster. Culling, the process of excluding hidden objects from rendering, is a common example. Three.js does view frustum culling based on bounding spheres, meaning it will avoid spending valuable compute time calculating visual information about objects that are off screen. It also does backface culling by default, which hides the back side of mesh faces. However, it doesn't do occlusion culling, meaning it doesn't know not to render an object that is in front of the camera but obscured by another object that is closer to the camera. The implication of these optimizations is that large meshes should often be split into several smaller ones to reduce computation if only part of the large mesh is on the screen, and you don't get any benefits by default from having short viewable distances. This simple change might be sufficient for top-down games where few objects...